Flutterby™! : NNTP syndicated weblogs for everybody!

What the hell, pre-announce everything, work the bugs out later. Remember ages ago when I announced that Flutterby had an NNTP feed? And then I asked what NNTP feeds from other sites should look like? I'm baaaaaack...

If you'd like your weblog NNTP syndicated, simply add some classes to various elements in your HTML templates. Multiple classes can be assigned to the same element as a list separated by spaces, for instance <div class="oneclass weblogentry anotherclass">, so even if you're using CSS this isn't a big deal.

weblogentry

Goes in an element surrounding the entire weblog entry, including title, archive and author links. Might be a <div class="weblogentry">, if you use tables probably a <tr class="weblogentry">.

weblogentrytitle

Around the weblog entry title or whatever text you want to make the subject. Might be a <h2 class="weblogentrytitle"> or even a <b class="weblogentrytitle">.

weblogentryarchivelink

In the "a" element that has the "href" attribute that points to your archive entry, ie: <a class="weblogentryarchivelink" href="http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/.

weblogentrybody

Around the main text of the weblog entry. Often a <td class="weblogentrybody"> or a <div class="weblogentrybody"> if you swing the CSS way.

Then email me with the URL of your blog, the newsgroup name you'd like under news://www.flutterby.com/flutterby.blogs.* and the email address you'd like as the "From:" on the NNTP posts (could be bogus, I'm not picky), and once an hour we'll do a minimal check to see if we need to re-get your page, and then syndicate it. Right now this only allows for one "From:" address per weblog. If there's call for more I'll figure something out. And no comments or threading yet, with comment spam becoming an issue I don't quite know how to go about implementing this (and weblog tools should be pushing, I shouldn't be polling). One-way comments from your weblog to the feed should be fairly easy, even if that's kludgey and I hate the concept.

I'm sure we'll do at least one hierarchy reorganization, and if anyone else has a server they'd like me to feed this stuff to please speak up. Let's do our best to supplant the idiocy that is RSS and bring some real syndication to weblogs.