A new web newsreader

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/8/11 3:30 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 December 2011 at 20:15:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> - Would you consider merging your codebase with
>> d-programming-language.org? That way we'd have a simple deployment
>> target and simpler unified maintenance.
>
> I'm not against moving the project to the D-Programming-Language GitHub
> organization, but I'm not sure what would be achieved by merging the two
> git repositories. Git's "submodule" feature may be more helpful here.

Essentially I'm looking at achieving a streamlined process that would 
allow me to type "make rsync" and deploy the whole thing. See 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/d-programming-language.org/blob/master/linux.mak. 
The process of generating an up-to-date site should be 100% automated.

> One thing that needs to be mentioned is that the project's scope is not
> solely the web interface. "DFeed" actually started out as an IRC bot,
> which among other sources, included the newsgroup as an event source for
> IRC notifications. I've refactored the code to use a publish/subscribe
> pattern, so IRC and the local message database (used by the web
> interface) are two of the consumers. A third one will be the front-page
> news widget I was planning to have a go at.

Sounds cool. Perhaps we'll get to modularize things nicely in the future.

>> - I'm thinking something with iframes may work for the above issue,
>> but cross-domain iframes are limited. Could we serve your content off
>> d-p-l.org?
>
> Yes. By far the best method would be subdomains (e.g.
> forum.d-programming-language.org or discussion.d-p-l.org).

That should be doable but I should say I have a mild preference for 
directories because every subdomain operation would need a roundtrip to 
the website admin.

>> * This may be a good time to retire a few unused forums such as dtl.,
>> debugger, dwt, ide, and merge their contents with digitalmars.D.
>
> I'm not sure if merging groups is possible on the NNTP level. Doing it
> in DFeed would involve lots of hacks.

Oh, I was thinking of merging at file/archive level on the server, which 
would involve no work on your part. But let's not spread ourselves too thin.

>> * The style file should be loaded from d-p-l.org such that changes in
>> style will be automatically picked up by the forums page.
>
> I edited the main stylesheet to avoid yet another few !important CSS
> overrides. I think it's best to handle this in the same way as the HTML
> template (automatic or semi-automatic patching).

Anything that's 100% automated.

One thing I remembered from my list of nits - would be great to have 
votes like on reddit... but first I'd say let's go head to toe through 
one release of this software. I'll be looking forward to your 
integration ideas.


Andrei