feed the world

Yet another modest-post. We received a lot of feature requests and a handful of bugs after our repeated requests. We're working hard on fixing the bugs, and let's see what we can do with the feature requests. It's not easy to find the right balance between keeping things simple and, on the other hand, adding features that people ask for. Being a long-time mutt and emacs user, I have some troubles keeping things simple & easy. But hey, nobody said it was easy.

Let's discuss something that I found quite useful: reading feeds with modest.

I like reading feeds; whenever I need to wait for something (e.g. waiting for the food during a romantic dinner), I like to read something interesting - software, science, culture, whatever. Now, while there is a feedreader on my N810, obviously I'd prefer to use modest for that.

Well, that's perfectly possible using feed2imap. I am assuming a Ubuntu/Debian system here, but it should work for other systems as well, mutatis mutandis.

• install feed2imap and libopenssl-ruby on your system;
  
• create a ~/.feed2imaprc file, it should look something like this (assuming you're using Gmail/IMAP):
  

  
  feeds: 
  - name: Planet Maemo
    url: http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/rss.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/software
  - name: Ririan Project
    url: http://ririanproject.com/feed/
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
  - name: Boing Boing
    url: http://www.boingboing.net/atom.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/misc
  - name: ScienceDaily Headlines
    url: http://www.sciencedaily.com/newsfeed.xml
    target: imaps://someuser%40gmail.com:somepassword@imap.gmail.com/feeds/science
    

  
  Obviously, you'll have to change the username/password;
  
• Note: if your are already using a different feedreader (such as Liferea), you can export your existing feedlist to an .opml-file. You can then convert this to a config file for feed2imap:
  

  $ feed2imap-opmlimport ~/feedlist.opml > ~/.feed2imaprc

  
  (you'll have to hand-edit it a bit as above)
  

That's it! Now you can periodically run feed2imap, and you'll always have something interesting in your mailbox.