[TAG] Article Ideas

[Jason Creighton]

On Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:20:01 -0400, 
Tom Brown <tfbrown at dejazzd.com> wrote:

> This isn't exactly a suggestion for a new article, but an idea I had for 
> browsing old ones. You could perhaps get to this kind of info today, but 
> I was thinking of something other than a Google search.
> 
> What about a web page that gathers all the existing articles by topic 
> and sub-topic, with links to the actual articles. For example:
>     Programming
>           |
>           +----Perl
>                  |
>                  +----article_title1 date_and_volume_number
>                  +----article_title2 date_and_volume_number
>                  +----article_title3 date_and_volume_number
> 
> And so forth. So many times people look for Answers that have already 
> been written-up. It would be nice to have it in one place. This wouldn't 
> have to be a collapsible tree view, of course, but that'd be nice too.

This would be a pain to update. So what we need to do is have it updated
automatically with every new issue. ISTR, and a quick grep confirms it,
that people are, or used to, use Cheetah and YAML to generate certain
index pages. (http://linuxgazette.net/issue84/lg_backpage.html).

So, couldn't we (By which I mean: Whoever maintains this now.) add a
"topic" key to the YAML data? So maybe the YAML data for "Adding Plugin
Capabilities To Your Code" of LG #84 would look like:

``
key:    bradley
author: bradley
title:  Adding Plugin Capabilities To Your Code
topic:  { Programming: C }
''

Here I envision "topic" would be a nested hash with topics and
subtopics. So if we decide that Ben's latest Perl article could be in
both "Programming: Perl" and "Rants: Endless", we could do:

``
topic:  { Programming: Perl, Rants: Endless }
''

[BTW, don't ya just love YAML?]

Of course, if we did this, we wouldn't have to limit ourselves to only
one level of nesting. But perhaps we'd only need one level. I don't
know.

Or, OTOH, if we thought one topic was enough, we could simply do:

``
topic:  [ Programming, Perl ]
''

...and skip the whole idea of multiple topics per article.

Jason Creighton