[Haskell-cafe] Haskell books index with RSS

[Travis Cardwell]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 9:38 AM Gregory Guthrie wrote:
> One additional feature which would be useful is an ability for people
> to give ratings and leave comments.
>
> Is a book current? Useful, advanced, ....etc.
> I saw your disclaimer for "advanced" ratings, but IMHO although
> subjective, multiple such opinions are informative.

Thank you very much for the feedback!  I agree that such information
would be very useful for people.

I implemented the index on my website because my (WIP) web framework
made it easy to do.  I have since realized that it would be more useful
as separate software.  I am thinking about creating a program that works
like a static site generator for this kind of index, and perhaps GitHub
would be a convenient place to host a Haskell books index using the
software.  Additions and corrections could then be submitted via pull
requests, and multiple maintainers could serve as editors.  The static
content could be hosted using GitHub Pages, and I am certain that GitHub
has better uptime than my VPS.  Dedicated software would also make it
easy for others to create and maintain similar indexes for all sorts of
topics.

Comments could also be submitted and moderated using GitHub pull
requests.  This would require each contributor to have a GitHub account
as well as be comfortable with creating pull requests.  This might be a
high bar for beginners, but feedback and contributions could be accepted
via issues or email as well.

I think that allowing people to submit ratings would be more challenging
to implement because ratings are more easily gamed than comments.  A
website could use GitHub OAuth for authentication and track ratings in a
database (or other form of persistence), but I do not know of an
acceptable way to implement ratings on a (standalone) static site
without raising the bar for contribution even higher.

I suggest GitHub, by the way, because many developers already have
GitHub accounts.  The software would not be coupled with GitHub (or even
Git), however, so other services or websites could be used to manage the
source as well as host the generated web assets and RSS feeds.

I will continue to think about the design.  Thanks again for the
feedback!