[sword-devel] [jsword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

[Peter von Kaehne]

> Von: Matthew Talbert <ransom1982 at gmail.com>

> > I can't read light purple on dark purple headings.... ;)
> 
> Wow, neither can I. No offense, but it hurts my eyes to look at the
> page currently...
> 

LOL!

That was unintentional. I rigged up the existing style sheet to do something/anything to it and grabbed the wrong colours.

Basically the purpose of the exercise was to see 

a) Is this possible?
b) What are the difficulties and limitations.

What I can tell so far:

1) The existing feeds on CrossWire are quite useful, some need adapting, but that should be very easy. The SWORD project news simply needs a pared down feed to it. Twitter threads are probably useless. 

2) Graphics and colour presentation aside - I could with little effort knock up a page which changes as news comes up. The frontends in turn could produce decent news with little effort required - and, crucially, no ongoing effort once the infrastructure is in place. A decent RSS feed established which pumps out the news you publish anyway (releases) is all that is needed - as BpBible's feed shows.

What I will not be able is to fulfil even a small part of the dynamic stuff DM asked for/suggested (expandable/user selective/cookies/movable etc etc). I think it pays to be realistic. I love tinkering and if I learn something in the process, so be it, but my desire is not on web design/web programming - I want to create modules and translate software. And even if I mess about a bit to create something nice - I will never get anything even semi-professional in this place

So the choice is simple 

- a static looking but continuously up to date page is easily achieved. I can do this and am very happy to do this if I get the RSS feeds from the frontends. I can fix CrossWire's feeds to make them more relevant (and squeeze out some frontend feeds for those who want to run with the existing news system. I certainly can create a prettier page than what I have thrown up there (readable colours etc :-))
 
- what DM suggested and asked for is only achievable if a) someone more gifted and knowledgable takes over or b) the dreaded CMS is thought over again a bit. So, if the desire is overwhelming to have something nice and dynamic - a web programming profi who creates something from scratch or a CMS system which delivers feeds, menus, expandable stuff, user management and preferences etc etc thrown in with source code management, wiki,fora etc (to avoid multiple frameworks) - and at that point I think we look at a nightmare of a transition. So it would require a lot of thought. 

This latter kind of decision is nothing for this public mailing list and ultimately is Troy's decision.

The main purpose of my post was to show what we could achieve with a decent and organised RSS feed system across the frontends. I guess I made that point.

Peter

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