The news works like that: there are a lot of newsgroups (thousands of them), each one with its subject. Then, you choose a group, and you can read its articles, post new articles, answer the articles, and so on. It's cool, because, this way, everyone can read your articles, and you can answer the articles you want!
There are thousands of groups. The newsgroups names are made with the inverse method of the other addresses: for example, the group pt.comp.geral is about pt (Portugal), about computers (comp) and about general matters (general = geral). The left domain is the bigger, and the right one is the smaller.
The news articles are spreaded around the world like this: when you post a message to some server, this server saves it and sends a copy to other servers, that send a copy to other servers, and so on till every server in the world has one copy of your message, to everyone read. The same thing happens with the messages posted by other people: a lot of messages coming from the outside arrive to your server, and they are retransmited again to other servers. As you can see, there's nothing to worry about. Every post go to everyware automatically!
Now you'll have to decide: how do you want to read the news? Online, or offline? Online means, as you know, keeping the PPP connection to your ISP always up. Keeping the connection up means more time used in a month. More time used it a month means a bigger phone bill. Ops! Here's the problem. But online news reading has some positive points: you may download files while you are reading the news*, you may follow a WWW link that appears in a news article immediately, you work in real time (so, you don't have to wait on the beggining), you may read any article you want. This is great, but your bank account is not very big, is it? So, work offline!
* ATTENTION: Don't try to download files and read news at the same time in slow Macs. Many times, the data flow is so big, and the news reader wants a bit of the CPU and a lot of the modem, that some parts of the file you are downloading simply disappear. You should do some tests (try to download a small file (300K), and read the news at the same time; then open the file and check if it's not damaged) before using this method. It's really bad, after downloading a 3 Mbytes file, to find out that "it's full of errors"!
The offline advantages are: you may write your articles and replies slowly, being able to look for information on your books and magazines, without worrying about the time you would be paying if you were online. You may read the articles peacefully. Your girlfriend may phone you while you are reading news, if you were online, you couldn't be able to talk to her. There are some disadvantages: before reading the articles, you must choose them, and that's a boring task to do; you can't open a WWW page while you are reading news, because your Mac is not connected to the Net; if you want to read an article that you didn't select on the beginning (because you thought you didn't want to read it), you must re-open the connection, download the article, and close the connection again; your mother-in-law may phone you while you are reading the news.
I changed, some time ago, to offline work, and I like the system very much. It wasn't very much time ago, so I still couldn't see the phone bills, but they must be lower! Choose the way you like more. Now, here's the necessary software:
| Online | On the Mac, to work online, you can use a news-client program, like NewsWatcher, or Netscape. I use Netscape and I like it, because it has a very good interface, it works fine, and it has the advantage that you don't need another separated program. But, if you want NewsWatcher, or another news program, you may go to the archie.doc.ic.ac.uk and look for it.
On the Netscape, the configuration is easy. You only need to know the news host that your ISP uses, put it on the correct space (network Perferences) and use it. To read news articles, choose Netscape News on the Windows menu, then choose "Show all newsgroups" from the Options menu. The available newsgroups list will be transfered to your computer, and then you can subscribe to the groups you want, clicking on the "subscribe" collumn in front of the group, in way to appear a After doing this, you may click on one group, and the article subjects (an article is like a mail, because it has a Subject line, a from: line, but it doens't have the To: line, of course!). To read an article, choose it from the articles list (clicking on the subject), and the article will appear on the bottom. To post new articles, choose "News News Message". To answer an article, choose "Post Reply".
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| Offline | If you choosed to work offline, you may use MacSOUP. This program is excellent, in my opinion. You may get the newest version at ftp://ftp.nacamar.de/pub/Macintosh/MacSOUP/MacSOUP-2.2.sit.hqx. This program needs InterNet Config (ftp://ftp.switch.ch/mirror/WWW/NCSA/Mosaic/Mac/Helpers/internet-config-12.sea.hqx) that you should always have installed in your Mac, because most programs today may use and/or need it. MacSOUP has a very good manual, so I won't talk about installation and configuration. Instead, I will explain how should you use MacSOUP.
At any moment of the day, or before opening the connection to your ISP, open MacSOUP. Now, write the articles you want, to any group you desire, with no timing problems. To start a new article, simply choose, on the Message menu, the command Post Article to... . A sub-menu will appear with every signed group. Choose the group you want the article to be posted to. You may also answer any article saved on the disk, since the last time you used MacSOUP. After writing everything, open the connection to your PPP; send the articles you wrote, and download the new articles headers. To do this, choose Connect To Server... on the Special menu. A window will appear. Now, check "Send outbound messages" and "Fetch news (new articles or headers)", and uncheck everything else. While MacSOUP downloads the articles headers, you may select the articles you want to read. To do that, just go to the main window (the groups window) (make sure MacSOUP received every header of that group before opening it), double click on the group you want, and click on the left of the desired articles. A mark will appear. After selecting all the articles you want to read, choose Connect To Server... again, and check the option "Fetch tagged headers", leaving everything else unchecked. The articles you selected will be transfered to your computer. When MacSOUP stops, you may close your PPP connection. Right now, you have on your hard drive the articles you selected. You may read them, answer, forward, and so on. When you are done, you want to send your answers to the news server (if you wrote any, of course). To do thet, open again the PPP connection, choose Connect To Server..., and check "Send outbound messages", unchecking everything else. Your answers will be sent. Then, you may close the PPP connection again. You're done! |
It's good to make some tests before using the news on some apropriated group (usually, they finish in .test), because there's people who get annoyed when they see one message with the "Test" subject.
Here you have some cool portuguese newsgroups. To go back to this page of the tour, click on the "Go back" button of your browser.
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(a blue V). Then, choose Show Subscribed Newsgroups on the Options menu.