Venus thoughts

[Arvind Narayanan]

Great!

Well firstly, I would like for comments from individual blogs to
automatically appear on the planet. The way I'm doing this now is to
have a separate comment server that parses the atom file that is
produced by venus, looks for the <link rel="replies"> tags and
downloads the comments from those urls according to some freshness
metrics. It produces JSON files of the comments which are fetched by
the browser when the user clicks "show comments". It works pretty
well. But I have to re-implement caching and everything so it would be
good to have this functionality integrated into venus.

Still on the subject of comments, I don't see any way in the template
engine to control their appearance, so I have a filter that's invoked
for every feed that changes the <entry> </entry> and inserts div's for
comments into it. This is a kludge; aside from having to invoke a
filter on every feed item, it means I have to regenerate all the
entries by nuking the cache every time I need to make a change to the
style or whatever in the comments box.

Second, I'd like to be able to apply a filter to the feed _before_ it
gets normalized. One of my subscriptions generates a broken-ass RSS
feed that doesn't have a <published> or <updated> tag, and so these
entries show up on top every time they're regenerated. I fix this by
having a filter for this feed that downloads each article, parses the
human-readable date off of the page and inserts a <published> tag.
This still doesn't work because the mtime is computed before the
filters are invoked. I made a one line change to spider.py to look for
the mtime again after the filters are invoked, but it's still an ugly
solution.

Third, it would be great to have a better category filter. The xpath
sifter is ok but it's too limited. I put together a quick and dirty
category filter that can handle arbitrary expressions; a typical
use-case for this is something like "!personal || planet" (like, if I
don't want my post about thanksgiving to appear on the planet, so I
label it personal, but if I'm dying of cancer then I can override it
by specifying the planet label  in addition.) I think it would be
useful for venus to support this natively.

Finally, I want to be able to produce only the first 10 entries in the
index.html file and a different file containing the contents of the
rest of the entries so that the page can load quickly with the first
10 entries and the rest  of the entries can load in the background
with javascript. Could you give me a rough description of what I need
to change in the code in order to produce two separate files instead
of one?

Thanks!
I do have some other minor issues but these are the major ones so I'd
like to get your thoughts on these first.

--Arvind

On Nov 26, 2007 5:45 AM, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net> wrote:
>
> Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm using venus to run a bunch of feed aggregators example:
> > http://feedworld.net/toc/
> >
> > Thank you for this nice piece of software. I have made several
> > additions to the venus code.
> > I have some suggestions, comments and feature requests and possibly
> > contribute some code
> > back. Would you be interested?
>
> Certainly.
>
> http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/docs/contributing.html
>
> - Sam Ruby
>