NNTP RSS
A week or so ago Jason Brome sent me an email about his open source project called nntp//rss which was exactly what I was thinking about doing, but I never got around to trying it out or posting about it until now (thanks to Ben for the reminder). It's small, quite well done and written in Java. Nice job Jason!
In case you want some blogs to try it out on, I created a channels xml doc for JavaBlogs. You can use the web interface that comes with the app to import the latest 130 JavaBlogs instantly. Since the Javablogs.com OPML interface is down, I had to view source and edit by hand (you're welcome), so it's not beautiful, but it works.
Now, the PLAN was to host the app on my server and invite you to try it online right now, but I'm having Java problems on the server where I'm running out of resources, etc. This is why my server's been down a couple times in the past few days. John's on it... until then, you'll have to download it and try it yourself.
Now, there's only one problem that I can see with the code. It's GPLed. Bleh. I don't like GPL because of the politics (and IMHO Unix and the internet was not built on GPL it was built on BSD). I'm going to see if I can convince Jason to publish under something less restrictive, like my fav the MIT license (do what you want with the code, but don't sue me). It's worked before... ;-)
-Russ