Re: [tlug] TLUG Site with Hakyll Update

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

Justin and I had a good session yesterday afternoon at Lodge figuring
out what we have now in terms of content and starting to work out the
next steps. The new ORGANIZATION[1] document covers a lot of this.

I also note that next Thursday is a holiday and might be a good day to
do another session (at Lodge or wherever) for anybody who wants to get
involved with this.

This morning I also added a new PROPOSALS[2] document describing
serious proposals for things we _could_ do but which may not justify
their cost, just so we can keep track of what we've discussed and why
we might or might not want to go down that path.

I've done enough proof-of-concept work that I am confident we have the
ability to add various types of automatic builds/release from a build
service if we need that (details in PROPOSALS[2]), so at this time, in
the interest of just getting a plausible replacement for the current
site completed, I'm not going to do further work in that area. I hope
this addresses any concerns about this and I'm happy to provide
support if someone else wants to take this further right now.

The main thing that would be _really_ helpful at this point is to have
a dump of the wiki markup source for all of the pages. I had assumed
that this would need to be done via a database dump or special dump
program, but as it turns out there's an API for MediaWiki that, at
least in modern versions, allows us to pull the information off the
site itself in various forms. Sadly, trying an example API URL[3] on
the TLUG site I get a notice that the API is not enabled ("Add the
following line to your LocalSettings.php: `$wgEnableAPI=true;`") so
I can't test this further, but maybe someone could turn this on?

I'm also no master of web scraping, but if that were turned on someone
like Jim might be able to a quick grab of the key stuff. Just keep in
mind that the tlug.jp version of MediaWiki is ancient (1.8.2 circa
2006) and so may be missing a lot of stuff the modern versions have.

In other news, the response to points 6 and 7 my last document has
been, well, none. I assume that this means we're all ok with me moving
forward with the Lisp thing, so I will be mandating S-expressions as
our markup language. This makes encoding HTML really easy, of course,
but for natural-langauge text we'll have to learn to build parse trees
for English. At least it makes grammar-checking easy!

[1]: https://github.com/tlug/tlug.jp/blob/master/ORGANIZATION.md
[2]: https://github.com/tlug/tlug.jp/blob/master/PROPOSALS.md
[3]: http://tlug.jp/mediawiki/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvlimit=1&rvprop=content&format=xml&titles=test

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch