2024-08-10 An offline reader using NNCP
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The NNCP manual suggests using rss2email to read feeds offline, via
NNCP. And why not! Email is great. Email via NNCP works.

Yesterday, however, I wondered about a program that would use NNCP
directly to pull new (Markdown) files. Such a "site" wouldn't have to
be on the web. It wouldn't need a feed. It would act like a blog
because new files are requested as they are published. They are
published by being linked to from some sort of index. In my case, for
example, index.md would be the "blog view" of the site (you'd only
get new pages as they are published) and changes.md would be the
"wiki view" of the site (you'd get updates if the page changes).
Request this file on a regular bases, then request every file linked
to from those pages (unless you already have a copy).

I've scripted this all using a bit of Perl. Sadly, installation is not
trivial because there's no Perl module to turn HJSON into JSON, so I'm
calling the hjson-cli programm which you have to install, too. Sorry!

To install the Perl modules, use CPAN:

    cpan JSON
    cpan CommonMark

To install hjson-cli if you have Go installed:

    go install github.com/hjson/hjson-go/v4/hjson-cli@latest

Ideally, I'd write a JSON::HJSON module, package it all for CPAN, and
then you'd install it using cpan NNCP::Pull or something like that.

​#NNCP