Feedbase is an Atom/RSS-feed to nntp gateway.
What this means is that Feedbase regularly fetches Atom/RSS-feeds and exposes the items using the nntp protocol, allowing you to follow the feeds using an nntp client (news reader).
This is quite convenient in a number of ways:
I have been using a very similar service, Gwene, since it was created.
Gwene has a couple of drawbacks: items with content in XHTML get horribly mangled - compare Gwene's display of this item to Feedbase's display.(I tried to fix this, but the underlying library used, XML::FeedPP, is too complicated for me to comprehend, and when I contacted the author his reply was that it can't be fixed).
The other drawback is that Gwene never grew the ability to allow comments, it is read-only. I would like to make it possible to discuss, locally, the various items in the feeds. On Feedbase, you can.
Another problem is that items have a tendency to be aggregated into multiple feeds (planets), and if you follow a couple of them, you see the same item many times. Feedbase detects this and uses crossposting to allow you to skip the article easily when you encounter it multiple times.
Finally people tend to update their posts, and while Gwene ignores this, Feedbase uses the nntp supersede functionality to present the correct updated article to the reader.
