[Nautilus-list] viewing binary newsgroups with Nautilus

[Andy Hertzfeld <andy differnet com>]

Hi everybody,

    The alt.binaries.* newsgroups harbor hundreds of thousands of
images, songs and other binary files of every conceivable description
(and then some), but they are hard to use because newsgroups were only
designed to transport relatively small text messages; large binary files
like mp3s have to be encoded into text (typically using uu or base64
encoding) and then broken into dozens of smaller messages.  Fortunately,
there are newsreaders that automatically coalesce and decode the
fragments for you, but none of them do a great job of making the content
very accessible (like previewing songs before you download them, for
example).

    Recently, I realized that it would be pretty cool to be able to
access the binary newsgroups with Nautilus, since they are really just
collections of files. So last month I wrote a gnome-vfs "nntp-method"
module that does all the dirty work of assembling and decoding the
fragments, presenting the user with a simple directory of binary files
that can be copied and previewed like ordinary files.  After getting it
going, I saw that there were often sets of related files (like songs
from the same album, or page images of a comic book) that should be
grouped together, so I added heuristics to group related files together
in directories, which made it much more usable.

    You can find screenshots and links to the source code at
http://www.differnet.com/nntp .

    Once installed, you can access newsgroups with urls like
"nntp://your.newsserver.address/alt.binaries.pictures.comics";.  You
might also have to supply a username and password in the url (i.e.,
"nntp://username:password your newserver address   "), since it doesn't
prompt for it yet.  You'll also have to turn on remote previewing in
Nautilus's preferences "Speed Tradeoffs" section if you want to see icon
text, thumbnails or sound previewing, which is  highly recommended,
since it's the coolest part.

    One caveat is that you have to use a fairly reliable news server for
large files like mp3s, since if a single message is dropped, the file
won't show up.  Also, I made it not show files smaller than 4Kbytes,
since that removes a lot of clutter; we eventually should make it a
configurable preference.

    While it seems to work with the few news servers that I've tried it
with, it certainly could benefit from more widespread testing; please
report any bugs to the gnome-vfs list. I've got a number of significant
extensions planned for it like making the directory writable so you can
post files to the newsgroups, and also letting you browse through the
newsgroups names, using folders (for example, nttp://newserver.com/alt.*
would show you folders for all the subgroups); there are also smaller
tasks like making it prompt for passwords or adding a preference UI to
configure stuff. I won't get around to those for at least a few months,
though, so let me know if anyone is interested in working on those or
other extensions.

 There were no changes required to gnome-vfs itself, it's strictly a
module, so I don't think it can cause any problems without it being used
directly. Unless anyone objects, I will check it into the GNOME1 branch
of gnome-vfs soon (GNOME2 Nautilus isn't robust enough yet for it to be
used effectively, but  I'll check it in on head there as well).

 Thanks.

 -- Andy