Re: random rants and shit

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004, Jon S wrote:

> 1) what's up with /rant/  ?  I restored the index.html, but it's all
> busted still.  i'm going to take it upon myself to rewrite the module to
> use php/mysql over the next few weeks.  RSS would be a good addition
> also (thanks for the mention aaron).

all your ideas are good except for this php/mysql suuggestion.  my day-job
is with php and mysql.  your proposal would probably be going backwards.
david's current system was pretty nice.  file-based rather than
database-based, but nice.  here's my hack at an explanation of the current
implementation, consider it a documentation contribution:

when a rant get's submitted by a ranter a web page is created for the rant
with all the angst-ridden template stuff and then also the rant index page
is regenerated (also with the template includes).  henceforth, every page
visit in the rants section doesn't result in any dynamic creation (besides
some minimal template stuff) of rant index pages or rant pages.  oh and
one other thing it updates the RSS XML file.  my comment on RSS from two
weeks ago was that David's work didn't quite have RSS quite right.  The
work's there though.

And it's all written in Scheme.  After some research, the reason it broke
isn't because of david's code or PLT scheme, but it appears it was because
phpwebhosting.com changed their security policies for PHP run as a CGI
(i.e. they decided to plug a huge security hole and drop a feature).

this current file-based nsystem works for our simple rants.  unless we're
going to upgrade it to php-nuke, or plone or slashcode (or insert your CMS
bull shit) it's overkill.

as a general comment, i think the web site is broke because it needs
fixing.  not necessarily a redesign.
/a