A new web newsreader

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Friday, 9 December 2011 at 15:15:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> It's news to me that opting for subdomains vs. directories 
> introduces significant differences in speed. Why?

A domain or subdomain simply points at the server to which the 
request should go - so, once the (sub)domain name is resolved to 
an IP address, the requests go directly to the application.

Assuming I continue running the program on my server, the only 
way to have the program appear under a subdirectory is to make 
the main website work as a proxy for all requests going to URLs 
in that "directory". This means that all data has to go to 
through the main website's server.

> There's also dlang.org. So in order to introduce new domains or 
> do domain operations I need to talk to:
>
> 1. Jan Knepper who manages d-programming-language.org
>
> 2. Brad Roberts who manages d-p-l.org
>
> 3. Oscar Brynolf who owns dlang.org (and whom I don't know)
>
> I can do this, but it's slow, suboptimal, and involves 
> dependencies out of my control.

So you'd like to create subdomains for all domains that lead to 
the website? I don't see why the necessity, other than to help 
the occasional person who doesn't remember which domain name we 
use for the forum subdomain. Note that if you're interested in 
aliases, they should be redirects, not mirrors (like d-p-l.org 
and unlike dlang.org).

> Interesting. I don't understand the security issues involved 
> and why they can't be addressed by the application, but you're 
> the doc. Perhaps we could hardcode only one domain there 
> instead of allowing attachments.xxx.org for three domains.

The short version is that HTML attachments may contain malicious 
JavaScript code, which will have access to all forum cookies. For 
example, it would be possible to write a worm which would repost 
itself whenever anyone opened the attachment.

> Sounds good. So, say I change doc.ddoc and/or style.css. What 
> is the flow through which those will be reflected on your end?

I'm thinking about a script that will download the files from the 
main website, apply whatever patches are necessary, and makes 
them live. I'm going to have a look at reducing the number of 
changes to minimum. Perhaps with a few changes on d-p-l.org's 
side, we can avoid any patching entirely.

> What would the URLs for posts look like?

url = site-root "/post/" stripped-message-id

site-root is currently 
"http://dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net/discussion".

stripped-message-id is the Message ID as it appears in the 
message headers, stripped of the terminal angle brackets, and 
with special characters percent-encoded using usual URL escape 
rules.

So, for example with the new domain idea, the URL to your post 
would be:

http://dpl-forum.net/post/jbt8lp$1v37$1@digitalmars.com