as days pass by

There are a couple of low-ish traffic mailing lists that I'd like to read in my feed reader, because I really only want to pay attention to what's posted, rather than follow up. I'm aware that this sort of behaviour is poison to building a community around a mailing list, but I really need this for -announce type lists, where there's no community anyway. What this of course means is that I need a way of converting a mailing list to an RSS feed. Fortunately, someone's ahead of me on this: Tom Dyson has set up MailBucket, which makes this whole process pretty easy. Simply subscribe some-email-address@mailbucket.org to the mailing list, and then an RSS feed of that list is available at http://mailbucket.org/some-mailing-list. Nice job! You'll need to take a glance at the feed after you've done the subscription, because most lists these days require some form of confirmation. Lists being run with the Mailman software are easy to handle, because their "please confirm your subscription" message contains a URL for you to visit to confirm it, which you can do. If you want to subscribe to a list which requires you to send an email from some-email-address@mailbucket.org to confirm subscription then it might be a bit more tricky; I don't know how to do that, but maybe Tom can help you. I've just used it to subscribe to the OpenMoko announce list, so I can find out when the all-new exciting OpenMoko phone becomes available. Looks suspiciously like an Apple iPhone, except it's been in development for longer than since MacWorld so it must be independent invention. And it's a completely open platform; runs Linux and X.org. I've been thinking about getting a new phone, since my z800i is starting to die, and is a Sony phone besides. (Bought before I really decided that I shouldn't give Sony any of my cash, but that's not the point.) For those of you who think the iPhone looks cool, there's a comparison between the OpenMoko phone and the iPhone available, which makes it look to me as though the iPhone has the edge in terms of equipment (and things like multi-pointer) but the OpenMoko is going to be available sooner and is an open platform. Write your own software for it, which means that all of us unbeautiful people have the chance to make our phones better. If you're not interested in that, fine; you're welcome to not buy it. Me, I like the idea. Only £180 too, which isn't all that much. I want one. And now I'll know when it's released.