Re: [syndication] Message Forum Sharing

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

Wow, I'd no idea that so many people were interested in message forum
sharing.

Okay, here's a first pass that's gonna go away sometime soon (hopefully,
you know how standards are) of some ideas that I and Carl Coryell-Martin
(of Civilution) are playing with. Yes, I will put an XML-RPC interface on
it, and we need some functionality for pushing the data rather than
polling it, but to paraphrase Paul MacReady(sp? the guy who built the
human and solar powered airplanes), anything worth doing is worth
implementing quickly and cheaply.

http://www.flutterby.com/archives/commentinfo.cgi can take one of two
parameters, "since" or "url".

"since" says "return information on all comments made since this date",
"url" says "return information on comments where this url was the primary
url of the entry being commented on".

Return data is text/plain, attr=value pairs, one per line, wrapping at the
"topic_url=" line.

data currently returned is:

"topic_url" - The URL being commented on, hopefully we can automatically
detect topic overlap by comparing these.

"archive_url" - The archive URL for the weblog entry.

"discussion_url" - how to get to the discussion.

"source_url" - The root URL for the weblog.

"commentcount" - the number of comments on this entry.

The idea is that in our various discussion forii we'll be able to say
"We've got X comments on this topic, but weblog Y has Z comments." The
hope is that we'll be able to let people know where the interesting
discussion for various topics is, since something that may be peripheral
to my audience may be dead-on for Civilution or Genehack or whatever, and
verse-vicea.

If you're playing with this, please keep a dialog going with me so that I
can warn you when things change. And, as I said, I do intend to put an
XML-RPC front-end on this shortly, I just wanted to take a couple o' free
minutes and get *something* up and running so that Carl and I could
continue to explore the idea.

When we talked last weekend, Carl was planning on opening up an XML
syndication of their actual discussion forum data too, I'll let him set
that standard and match him, but we had a few questions and issues about
the legal and ethical status of syndicating that content that we'll
undoubtedly have to work through as we get a little further.

There's also the whole "wait, NNTP already does this" thing, but since the
dominant technologies nowadays seem to be pretty heedless of what sandards
and systems have gone before, I guess there's no real social stigma
attached to reinventing wheels.

Dan