Word Wizard wrote: > Are there stand alone news feeds and home > page services out there ?
There are (or were) plenty of free usenet servers around, and some were actually pretty reliable, last time I used any. This is for text groups, though. If you want consistent, reliable access to binary newsgroups, you're almost definitely going to have to pay. The alternative is to monitor alt.free.newsgroups closely and jump on any notice of free servers that appears there, or find some other source of information about the ever-changing world of free binary servers out there. (That can often mean taking advantage of some poor admin's configuration error, which leaves a server open to all comers if you know where to find it. Needless to say, these types of mistakes are usually corrected PDQ by the company running the server.) Commercial services are numerous and many have a pretty good range of pricing plans. It's not too difficult to find a plan that reflects your usage pattern (amount you want to download, rate at which you want to download, etc.). But if you only want access to text newsgroups, check out alt.free.newservers and see which seems to be the most popular free services around now. At one time, I used [1] DFNNetNews, based in Germany. It required registration, but was free, complete, and reliable. I'm not sure, however, that it's still available to those outside Germany. The other favorite was [2] Readfreenews, which is run by the same guy who runs the commercial provider [3] Octanews, based in Minneapolis. He also runs Big Gulp, which does include binary newsgroups, but binary downloading is severely throttled. Still, if your binary needs are very limited, it is a good free option. As for homepages, what's wrong with iGoogle or similar (Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.)? What does Comcast's home page have that these don't? Michael M. [1] http://news.cis.dfn.de/ [2] http://www.readfreenews.net/ [3] http://www.octanews.com/ _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
