RSS or Usenet feeds?

[jimbreen]

I am an old-timer on Internet forums, having joined the
sci.lang.japan Usenet group in 1989 (my life hasn't been
the same since then.) I occasionaly visit thejapanesepage, but
I find it a bit impenetrable. I don't like clicking my way down
into the forums to see if anyone has said anything interesting
or asked a useful question. I guess I really prefer a stream of
things to be delivered, and to pick and choose what I want to read.

Has anyone given attention to spreading the thejapanesepage
content via:

- RSS feeds. It should be possible to set up feeds for each of
the forum topics, showing (say) the Subject and the first sentence.
People like me, who keep an RSS reader running on things like
news headlines could add a subscription.

- Usenet feed. Putting a copy of each forum posting into a
Usenet group would be quite feasible. There could be a
hierarchy mirroring each forum topic, e.g.
alt.thejapanesepage.<topic>

Either of the above would increase the accessibility, spread
and (ultimately) usefulness of thejapanesepage.

Cheers

Jim Breen (who enters his 7th decade tomorrow, and thus officially
becomes a "Senior")

[coco]

Jim Breen (who enters his 7th decade tomorrow, and thus officially becomes a "Senior")

日頃からJDICにはお世話になっております。
一日早いけれども、古希のお祝いを垂ｵ上げます。

[clay]

お誕生日おめでとうございます！

It is an honor to have you here.

That would be a Zen (the computer guru) question. I'm afraid he will probably say the software that runs TJP (PHP Fusion) is pretty limited. He has a goal to move to a more flexible content management software at some point. We will be sure to make RSS a part of the software.

[lalaith]

Not THE Jim Breen of Monash University (which I have just done a quick search on & learned it's in Australia, your location)?

The one whose JDIC my Japanese studies live by?

I'd faint, but then my head would hit the keyboard and all that blood would make a mess.

Oh, and (whichever Jim Breen you are):

お誕生日おめでとうございます!

[debu]

Jim, thank you very much for your work on EDict. I'm sure most of the people on this forum have benefited from your work at some time or another. And for what it's worth, I would love to have RSS feeds as well. It's so easy to lose track of a thread if it's not getting bumped constantly.

[doinkies]

ジムさん、はじめまして。ドインキーズです。いつもWWWJDICを更新してくれて本当にありがとうございます。JDICにはお世話になります。TJPにもっともっと書き込んでくださいね！

よろしくおねがいします、そして、お誕生日おめでとうございます！

[zengargoyle]

jimbreen wrote:
I am an old-timer on Internet forums, having joined the
sci.lang.japan Usenet group in 1989 (my life hasn't been
the same since then.) I occasionaly visit thejapanesepage, but
I find it a bit impenetrable. I don't like clicking my way down
into the forums to see if anyone has said anything interesting
or asked a useful question. I guess I really prefer a stream of
things to be delivered, and to pick and choose what I want to read.

while i do not share your physical age, i do share your Internet age... my first Usenet group was around 1987 (talk.bizarre, comp.sys.amiga, alt.gothic.*, ...), and i lament the way that the web revolution has thrown away the amazing wonder of Usenet...

the second or third bit of PHP code i made for TheJapanesePage.Com site was this:
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/forum/superview.php which as a logged-in user will show you new posts since your last visit. (it's sorta broken, but i blame the evil that is PHP-Fusion (the software that TJP uses), but you can get a list of "new" posts since last visit (as PHP-Fusion calculates the 'last visit' part).

Has anyone given attention to spreading the thejapanesepage
content via:

- RSS feeds. It should be possible to set up feeds for each of
the forum topics, showing (say) the Subject and the first sentence.
People like me, who keep an RSS reader running on things like
news headlines could add a subscription.

like Clay said, one of my long term projects is migrating the current TJP software to something more recent... you will probably understand, long before i even knew about TJP, TJP was there... running on a random PHP based forum software that had no idea about multi-byte character languages... the reason i joined TJP was to fix a bit of SJIS encoding problem with software that doesn't comprehend multibyte character encodings... maybe you know how much trouble a single-byte only piece of software can have when the '\' (backslash) character is a *valid* character in multi-byte SJIS encoding..

anyway... a long standing project of mine involves converting the old SJIS posts (some of which are malformed because of the backslash problem), and the user database, and the articles and everything else into UTF8 for import into a more modern (UTF capable) piece of software. (probably Drupal). if we were to throw away all of the old forum posts, and user information.. it would be easy to start a new TJP with all of the features expected of a modern forum, but i don't want to loose the history that TJP has.

- Usenet feed. Putting a copy of each forum posting into a
Usenet group would be quite feasible. There could be a
hierarchy mirroring each forum topic, e.g.
alt.thejapanesepage.<topic>

i also wish that Usenet was more well known by the newbies to the Internet. almost every feature request of TJP members is something that i think... "gee, our forum should be based on Usenet news... all of these problems were solved 20 years ago." we might be able to do such a thing, but 90% of the current TJP userbase has no knowledge about Usenet news...

Either of the above would increase the accessibility, spread
and (ultimately) usefulness of thejapanesepage.

i pretty much agree with everything you've said. 99% of forum feature requests would not be needed if TJP was a Usenet news group... but the truth is that the younger generation has no idea about how to use news, they were born and raised on web based forums. and a lot of our problems are because TJP is so old, TJP started before UTF8 was viable for Japanese text, and before there was PHP based software that could handle multibyte characters.

the big sticking point is me finding enough time to convert the old forum information for import into new UTF8 capable software, and the inevitable user revolt when everything changes. but the end goal is to have TJP on modern software that supports any characters (via UTF), where the search function actually works, and there are RSS feeds for anything you wish (by forum, or forum topic, or post tags, or any combination).

like i always say, be patient, wait a few months and everything will be peachy. we have a Chat server that is XMPP/Jabber based, sometime *real soon now* we'll have video/audio chat capability for those people who want to download and learn to use a new chat client... and someday soon, as soon as i can, TJP will be moved to new software that will have threaded forums, user defined RSS feeds, folksonomy tagged posts, and like 90% of the features that have been requested that are currently "too damned hard to do with the current software".

[hyperconjugated]

Outstanding job with everything
Jim and happy birthday! Live long
and prosper.

[jimbreen]

coco wrote:

Jim Breen (who enters his 7th decade tomorrow, and thus officially becomes a "Senior")

日頃からJDICにはお世話になっております。
一日早いけれども、古希のお祝いを垂ｵ上げます。

Thanks, but I'm not quite 古希. "enters his 7th decade" means "turns 60".
}

[jimbreen]

Thanks everyone, both for the birthday wishes, and for the considered
responses to my suggestions/wishes. Thanks to Zen for the detailed
reply. I'll try and keep an eye on the "superview" link.

Jim

[furin]

Thanks, but I'm not quite 古希. "enters his 7th decade" means "turns 60".

はは それでは、還暦のお祝いを垂ｵ上げます。

[coco]

こりゃまた失礼いたしました。＾＾;

Furinさん ありがとう。

[bombush]

Mr. Breen, your JDIC has made study of Japanese a lot easier for many people so we owe you big thanks. And wish you a happy birthday of course .

[Infidel]

zengargoyle wrote:

the big sticking point is me finding enough time to convert the old forum information for import into new UTF8 capable software, and the inevitable user revolt when everything changes.

Hey Zen,

I'd say don't bother converting. I just went through a similar conversion on the SOE boards recently. Just preserve the database and you're good so it is searchable. Trying to convert an everexpanding database is a sisyphean task.

I think the community will react pretty well to a change if functionality does improve. A lot of us came from about when they "improved" the forum by making it incompatable with Japanese text. You can keep the old database and embed google for searching it. Then we can still refer to old posts at need, and save you a lot of unnecessary work.

The important thing is our community, which is pretty impressive, not our backlog of posts. Since we are so active, we will quickly establish a backlog on any new system you might come up with.

[Yudan Taiteki]

One possibility is a web frontend to sci.lang.japan that works off TJP's username and password. I've seen this done on other sites, and it could bring more traffic to slj (if that's desired).