Re: Perlmonks Threaded Article Viewer

[grinder]

grinder screams

This is simply brilliant!

This is a marvellous idea. I've long lamented that it's so hard to dig up ye olde nodes in the monasterie. And with this I've been noodling around looking at some ancient history, and it's really easy. Funny how weird and wacky the early meditations were.

Some random thoughts. It would be nice if...

• the pages had meaningful <title> tags;
• you factored out the "top level nodes" on each line, into a <th> heading;
• ...which would let you go to a layout with four years side by side with the month breakdown indented and underneath each year. (The fifth year would go below, and so on) Otherwise the top level page is too sparse;
• one could jump straight to the Perl Monks thread, once you reached the page with the nodes of the day;
• you displayed the daily root nodes grouped by category (SoPW, Meditation, Code, Snippet, PMD);
• I had a page with all my root nodes. Admittedly for the more prolific monks this could be a problem;
• you made an XML ticker-style interface to let me probe the backend database (date=20010319&cat=sopw), (author=grinder&cat=meditation);
• the page with the nodes of each day in the month was laid out seven columns across, and resembled the calendar. I actually parsed the output of cal to do this once, but I got better. Now I would use Date::Calc or a close cousin;
• if there was a best of. The day with the most nodes, most questions, most meditations and what not.

I'm still reeling. I'll sleep on this and see what else comes to mind. Anyway, if you implement some of these ideas, I have the feeling you'll be on your way to extracting real information from the mass.

Do you want patches? :)

--

g r i n d e r
just another bofh

print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u';