Subject:
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Re: RSS output format (was: Re: Lugnet for beginners)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Fri, 3 Mar 2000 06:13:27 GMT
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Viewed:
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980 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> In other words, back when the Spotlight pages were begun, it was very easy
> to justify trying that out, because it literally was zero programming to
> implement it -- it's just one particular application of the plaintext markup
> format I was tinkering with last fall. Now that the Spotlight has shown[1]
> itself to be useful, it's worth doing special things to improve the feature.
Taking this RSS/Channels thing a step further, here's a related possibility
which applies the RSS suggestion to a more general problem domain:
First, I'd like to scrap the current Spotlight (after a one-time data
conversion to a new format, preserving all of the old entries for posterity)
and make a new Spotlight arising this time from the article-snarf feature I
was talking about a few months ago -- but with a twist: Rather than each
LUGNET member having a simple list of news articles or spotlight entries, let
each member's list be an externally-devourable RSS channel, and internally,
give each channel the capability to transclude (include by reference) any
arbitrary collection of other channels -- recursively -- along with arbitrary
collections of data article items.
In other words, your channel could include, say, news items foo and bar and
zot, plus anything in Abe's and Cal's and Zed's (or any member's) channels.
Abe's and Cal's and Zed's channels might consist only of pure items, or they
might be a mix of items and other channels, or they might even be a mix of
just other channels. (But it wouldn't matter to the viewer -- only to the
server -- it would hide all the mess transmagically.)
Then, each newsgroup (or, more specifically, web category) also gets its own
channel, where each can transclude any collection of other channels to make a
larger, meta-channel (just like a member channel, only it would have a slightly
different URL structure). At the very top of these would sit the main, all-
encompassing channel, which would conglomerate together all of the second-level
newsgroup channels, which would in turn conglomerate together the relevant
third-level newsgroup channels, etc. (In practice, the end result would be a
lot like the current Spotlight feature, except that it would get updated much
more frequently, by many different people, and it may have greater breadth.)
A more trimmed-down "lite" version of the Spotlight could easy be culled from
that, in fact. Each newsgroup channel would also need a moderator to see to
it that interesting things got added to the group's channel periodically.
Does any of the above make sense? I'm itching to free myself from the current
Spotlight "prison" I've created for myself (which takes more time per day than
I'd like -- even though it is a lot of fun), and I also think it would be very
useful to the community for each member to be able to publish his/her own
version of the Spotlight -- much more flexible filtering that way. This isn't
exactly a priority-one feature, except that the longer it's avoided, the worse
the current problem of not having it gets.
Oh, one other thing -- each object in the list which makes up a member's
personal channel should have a flag saying whether it's private or public
(decided by the user). You might want to collate and read information from,
say, 10 different channel sources, but only to republish, say, 5 of those --
or zero of them, and select items for inclusion manually only when something
really stands out.
So, to recap, basically the idea is this: You're on the website viewing some
message that someone posted, and you say, "Gee, that's a great post, I wanna
add that to My Channel." So you click the Add To My Channel button and --
bink! -- it's added to your personal Channel. Now anyone who gets a feed of
your Channel will see that message (duplicates removed automagically, of
course). And if you want your channel to include stuff automatically without
your having to add it, you can set your Channel up to be the composite of
any other channels -- any mix of other people's channels and/or newsgroup-
topic channels.
--Todd
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