Venus thoughts

[Arvind Narayanan]

> and to do the appropriate caching, etc.  While I'm a fan of JSON in
> general, I'm not sure I would bother with it here, as XMLHttpRequest can
> handle Atom entries just fine.  My search page does exactly that:

Oh, I have no opinion on the matter; I'm just using JSON because I'm
lazy and with JSON can do a map over the array that is returned and it
saves me a few lines of javascript.

> Unrelated: my biggest issue with 'show comments' is that initially a
> post tends to have few comments, but over time it tends to (1) accrue
> comments and (2) move down the page.  Any thoughts on how to highlight
> posts with new activity?

Sure. At the back end, produce a unified comment RSS feed for all the
posts; end users could of course consume this feed directly, but more
usefully, these could show up in a sidebar on the planet page.
Clicking on a comment link would automatically go to the anchor
associated with that post, cause all the comments on that post to be
downloaded, and further seek to the anchor for that comment. (Actually
I really like this UI, and I hope that when I implement it it will be
as nifty as it feels in my head right now :-)

> Something I haven't exploited as much as I can, but if you peek into the
> source of my planet intertwingly html page, you will see that each entry
> has a div which specifies the source as a class name, meaning that I can
> create custom CSS rules targeting individuals.

I see. I will look into it. Thanks.

> This I don't understand.  Entries without dates are assigned 'now' the
> first time they are seen.  When they are seen again (as determined by
> id/guid or computed from link or text), they should retain their
> original date.

Well, when the cache is deleted the dates are lost, aren't they?
Actually this doesn't seem like an important issue any more. When I
was setting up the thing I had to delete the cache every now and then,
but now it seems to have stabilized.

> More example filters are always goodness.

Okay cool. I will polish it and send it in.

> Producing two files can easily be done by having two templates.  Now,
> the question turns to how you can have a template display only the first
> 10 entries, or display all but the first 10 entries.  That depends on
> the templating language.  Doable in XSLT, not doable in htmltmpl.

Oh, XSLT can handle that? Interesting. Although this means I will have
to learn XSLT now :( I had to do it at some point I suppose :)

Okay now on to minor issues:

one of my sources has an incorrect replies link which points back to
the original RSS. So if you click on "subscribe to comments", you end
up subscribing to the feed itself. I don't know how common this
brokenness is. I was wondering if venus could detect such an incorrect
configuration and suppress reporting the replies link if it happens.

second, the wfw:commentRSS links don't get reported in the sanitized
atom feed. This is problematic because I can't import comments for
RSS2 feeds. (Wordpress produces atom feeds, but they don't seem to
have rel=replies tags.) From what I understand of the venus
architecture, this is actually a feedparser.py issue? Is there any way
you can fix this?

third, some of my subscriptions don't have a comments feature; i plan
to import these into my own wordpress installation and enable
comments. to do this i want to set a flag for each of these feeds in
the config.ini file and create a template to produce a separate atom
file for these feeds alone. AFAICT this should be possible with
htmltmpl, right?

Thanks again
--Arvind