So, I made a great discovery yesterday.

This is a screenshot of Outlook Express running on my Windows 2000 laptop. Notice the column on the left side of the screen entitled “RSS Feeds.” For some of you, this is an intriguing and exciting development. For the rest, it’s more techno-jargon geekery. Read on to find out more.

When I was browsing the web the other day, I came across (via Mark Pilgrim) the nntp//rss project. What this project does, essentially, is convert RSS feeds to a format that a news reader (such as Outlook Express, Mozilla, or a whole host of others) can understand.

RSS—which stands for Really Simple Syndication—is a very pervasive technology. Thousands of blogs on the internet have an RSS “feed” that can be collected by programs called “news aggregators” (this is actually but one of the uses for RSS feeds, but the reductionism is necessary for this discussion). These aggregators collect the feeds from several blog or news sites on the internet and compile it for you in one single location to read so you don’t have to page through dozens of websites. RSS is so prevalent on the internet that already several of my favorite sites provide feeds (some, no doubt, without their knowledge!). Among them:

• Ryan Abrams
• Heather Armstrong
• John Bell
• Jai & Becky Brinkofski
• Darin Pesnell
• Krissy Pesnell
• Mark Pilgrim
• Ken & Sarah Walker

…to name a few. (By the way, if you’re on this list and didn’t think you would be, could you follow these instructions to provide full blog entries through your XML feed? Thanks.)

There are literally a plethora of news readers available to aggregate sites for you, but each of them has issues that make them less-than-convenient. Syndirella has a great interface and is easy to use, but is too devoted to Internet Explorer and lacks all the cool browsing features that Phoenix has. NewsMonster requires Java and a full version of Mozilla to run, which makes it slow. The user interface (as with Mozilla) is also overwhelming. I never played with AmphetaDesk in Windows, but the Linux install was a nightmare. NetNewsWire is OS X only. And so it goes. Perhaps the biggest complaint about all of these programs, though, is that they require yet another user interface for me to use throughout the day. (Oh, by the way, SharpReader was also released recently, too).

That’s where nntp//rss comes in. I already have and use a news reader several times a day: Outlook Express. The nntp//rss project runs a virtual NNTP server on my local machine which, in turn, collects RSS feeds from the internet. I was then able to “subscribe” to my localhost “newsgroups.” These RSS newgroups, in turn, were set up through a convenient web interface that let me add and remove RSS threads. The configuration can be a bit daunting to start since the server requires you to know where Java is installed on your machine, but, once you get over that hump, the setup is actually pretty transparent—with the provided instructions, I was even able to set up nntp//rss to run as a Windows 2000 service!

The result? Anytime John or Krissy or Ryan or Mark updates his or her website, I can find out and read it instantly from my mail client.