Reading Usenet with Gmane

I've ranted before about Google's fugly usenet ASCII rendering and pointed to a ncsa usenet archive.  Googling a random tech topic, I ran as usual into a gmane archive.  Gmane focuses on archiving maling lists associated with open source, with nice alternatives to the ACM archives for sigchi.resources and also in the uxp space, open-hci. It's a nice way to keep up with selective moz newsgroups like SVG, though I use the mozilla mail gateway for .xpfe. The occasional solution that flows through that group is well worth local archival and I regularly use flags to mark key content.

Since google introduced the usenet archive I haven't spent any significant amount of time in a dedicated usenet newsreader.  Gmane's newsreader UI offers the right segmentation of my activities for groups like those mentioned above -- right along with web browsing.  It also has a quite slick reading interface.  After you select a message in the threaded headers list, it scrolls the header pane to show you that threads content or just remove from view the messages you chose to skip.  This would be a good innovation for a 2/3 pane rss aggregator.

It also incoporates visited and current visual highlighting -- best use of frames I've encountered in a while.While Yahoo's new search is unlikely to draw me away from google, gmane's got a got shot for the usenet groups it carries.
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Posted at 18:57, Published in: Mozilla UI