Yesterday I ruminated about monitoring a listserv feed via a blog aggregator.
After an extensive (well 24h) test it seems to be working well giving me what I want - an easy way of scanning the topics. And because it's a blog, you can of course go and read the whole post if it piques your interest.
The only thing I might do differently is feed each listserv monitored into a separate blog, but given this is for my own use rather than a production service I'll leave it as it is.
The nice thing about this experiment is that it also shows a way we could potentially get service status announcements - which we normally send out via a list server to key members of our user community fed out into a blog on our blog service for people to monitor, and of course subscribe to the rss feed ...
Update 27 May
Only problem when people get chatty it overflows the maximum number of allowable posts. However the technique definitely works for less chatty lists.
Given that I'm only reading my feeds twice a day doing a set digest command to batch up the mailings to a short number of messages is quick fix. Question is, is this more efficient than simply getting the digest mailed to you ...
Update 28 May
Well digestifying solves one problem, but you lose the snappy summary of the contents, in just teh same way that the Guardian's full text feeds force you to scroll through each article to see the feed contents ....
Update 30 May
Well I think my experiment shows that it was a worthwhile exercise as an additional way of getting small infrequently updated material out there but less so for high volume mailing lists.
The blog has been marked as spam due to its repetitive nature. I was going to leave it running in case someone found it useful, but it's being a pain administratively so I'll be deleting it in the next few days ...
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