Project Title

Web Based News Reader

Introduction

Usenet is used by many people, for many different purposes. The rise of the home network has made the job of keeping up with news groups incredibly difficult as articles read on one computer are not automatically marked as read on other machines. This project attempts to address these issues by producing a system which is both easy to use and which incorporates similar features to be found in the more popular news readers. Also, the software can be configured to provide a remotely accessible, centralised system where a user may read news articles.

Objectives

The objectives of the project are to:

• Research user needs & requirements in a Web based application.
• Develop a functional & usable Web based news reader.

Minimum requirements

The minimum requirements for this project are:

• A usable web interface for browsing news groups
• Ability to post to news groups via the interface (including followup)
• Identification of individual users within the School of Computing
• Produce a printed project report

A few possible enhancements to the project are listed below:

• User preferences
• Threaded article views
• RDF/RSS (XML) feeds of specific news groups, articles or message threads
• Output of articles or threads to Postscript
• Interface templating
• Security