Google Groups is finally out of beta, so I thought I’d update my blog post from 2004 which described how to subscribe to Google Groups feeds in FeedDemon (or any feed reader, for that matter).
To view the available feeds for a specific Usenet group, navigate to a URL which uses this format:
http://groups.google.com/group/NAME-OF-GROUP/feeds
Or to skip that and subscribe to an Atom 1.0 feed containing the most recent 15 messages, use this format:
http://groups.google.com/group/NAME-OF-GROUP/feed/atom_v1_0_msgs.xml
For example, to see feeds for the alt.html newsgroup, browse to this page:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.html/feeds
And to subscribe to the Atom feed for alt.html, use this URL:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.html/feed/atom_v1_0_msgs.xml
So does FeedDemon work better with ATOM or RSS? if the same, which do you prefer? The atom you show as an example or did you pick that ATOM as it is first one?
FeedDemon works fine with both RSS and Atom. I chose the Atom feed in this case because it includes the name of the person who made the Usenet post, whereas the RSS feed doesn’t.
Nick, could you get it work with protected feeds? I.e. not listed, invitation-only Google Groups. I couldn’t, despite providing userid/password:-9
Zoli, I haven’t tested any protected Google Groups feeds (didn’t even know they existed, actually). Can you provide an example of one?