[pmwiki-users] How to use RSS instead of mailposts

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Tue May 23 17:41:00 CDT 2006


Patrick R. Michaud schrieb:
>> 3. Can the search / search display be improved so we can find the 
>> stuff or simply ditch it and replace with google's search within 
>> pmwiki.org?
> 
> I need specifics about how the search display should be improved.

Hmm... there's one thing I'd like to have.

The problem with the current RSS abilities is that they will show me the 
latest ten (or whatever) changed pages. Whether I have visited them 
since the last change or not.

How about this:
Change the RecentChanges format so that it includes the date of change 
in the URL somewhere. (E.g. "?wrzlbrmft=2006-04-01-10-30-15". Since the 
query string isn't supposed to be used by PmWiki, it could be anything 
that contains a timestamp of some sort.)

That way, pages that I haven't visited since their last change will have 
one or more lines with a blue link; those links that I already followed 
to check the change will be marked in violet.


The problem with this scheme is that it will always give a fixed-length 
list. 10 entries may be too many or too few, depending on the activity 
level of the wiki. A better mechanism would be a RecentChanges list that 
included just the changes starting at a given date.

So here's a slight variation on the above theme: turn the query string 
into e.g.
   ?seen_until=2006-04-01-10-30-15
and do the following:
1) when handling a seen_until action, mark the change of that date on 
that change as seen by this user (probably by setting an 
infinite-lifetime cookie on that user's computer)
2) when handling RecentChanges, retrieve the infinite-lifetime cookie(s) 
and filter the entries that the user already has seen.

(There are several details that should be addressed: various filtering 
options for the RecentChanges markup so that a user can still see the 
full list if wanted; also, the "already-seen" flags should be in a 
single cookie, which means there should be some means to keep its size 
strictly controlled - e.g. introduce a cut-off date and/or a maximum count.)

Regards,
Jo




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