On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:56:47 -0400
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Random page of the day script
We may need more information about the document data: "The correct
thumbnail filename should be easy as the primary image filename is a
subset of the page URL"? Are you linking to an HTML page, an image,
or some other file download?
The live page URLs are of the form http://www.foo.com/catalog/ItemA01.html
. Each page is guaranteed to have at least one image named e.g.,
ItemA01.jpg - that is, the image [thumbnail] filename can be directly
extracted from the URL (as opposed to parsing the page contents for
images).
The intention is as follows:
We create a manually maintained text file with the URLs (one per line) of
the pages that may be selected as a "random page".
The code picks a "random" URL from this text file and generates HTML code
from it of the form [which gets inserted into the home-page]:
<div id="randompage">
<a href="http://www.foo.com/catalog/ItemA01.html";><img src="ItemA01.jpg"
/><br />Title text drawn from page ItemA01</a>
</div>
The first step is to flag the documents while completing any
additional information such as a summary. Title and filename can be
calculated from existing data.
No, to keep things simple, the choice of documents will be a simple
manually maintained text file of URLs. I tried adding a map:part to the
aggregation in publication-sitemap.xmap to run some xsp to generate a
randompage element with the URL and related information in it such that
page2xhtml.xsl could pick it up and transform it (it isn't / doesn't work
yet). Sorry, if I'm sounding a bit ignorant on this, I am slightly out of
my depth! (not all of us work in University Computer Science Depts!).
The automation collects all flagged pages to a list. Cache if process
is slow and frequent. Choose using a random number. (See Andreas
Hartmann's post in this thread.) Cache the number or the results if
stability is desired. Add the resulting snippet to the homepage.
Yes, but how? Am I along the right lines with my efforts above?
--
I am happy you like my documentation. More should appear. Migrating
my websites to Lenya 1.3 has higher priority than posting additional
documentation, but most of the Lenya section was collecting and
organizing my posts to the mailing lists so new material depends on
the level of activity on the MLs.
Lenya is conceptually brilliant, but I would happily drop everything for a
week to contribute to a "Lenya documentation for dummies" effort. If I'm
brutally honest, the lack of documentation accessible to intermediates for
what is a very complex system depending on so many technologies is the
real gap in what would otherwise be the killer-CMS. Dare I say it, Lenya
would IMHO benefit greatly with a bit more of an Ubuntu / Shuttleworth -
style philosophy.
Regards,
James
XSL is Turing-complete according to the academics. So is COBOL.
Turing-completeness is about possibilities. Real world programming is
about time to usability and ease of maintenance. The W3C forgot XPath
needs a random() function. XPath 2.0 has been a draft for two years.
Does anybody know how to make suggestions?
Well, emailing the CSS team probably won't help with a speedy resolution.
10 years and counting ...
solprovider
On 9/22/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Some interesting ideas here!
It doesn't have to be strictly "Page of the day" ("Page of the browser
refresh" is fine for our purposes). It would just be leaves, not
categories, doesn't have to include every page of a certain document
type but rather a hand-picked selection and doesn't have to be
especially random.
I was thinking of a manually updated file of page URLs maintained by the
administrator with a bit of JavaScript(?) that picks a "random" URL from
the file and 'somehow' extracts the page title (for use as link text) and
the correct thumbnail filename (which should be easy as the primary image
filename is a subset of the page URL).
Regards,
James
P.S., You are aware that XSLT is Turing-complete aren't you ;-) Jesting
aside, thanks for your HOWTO pages, I refer to them frequently.
On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"Page of the Day" implies daily update so the update function should
be scheduled once each day. Cache the pagelet. Delete the homepage
from cache so it updates to include the new material..
The selection should exclude the homepage. Only include leaves or
should category pages be included? Should editors set a flag on pages
that should be included? Maintain list of previously chosen pages to
prevent frequent repeats. How many items on recently used list?
Use XMAP and XSL to create list of possible pages. Add a random
number to each item. Use the page with the lowest number.
The main design decision is how to create the random numbers. A
completely XSL solution would be fun, but a custom transformer that
adds a "random" attribute to every element (excluding root) would be
simple.
solprovider
On 9/21/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We want to provide a thumbnail on the home-page which represents and links
to a random page of the day under Lenya. The random pages don't
necessarily have to selected "live" (I was thinking of dumping the URLs
to a file periodically and making some sort of script to select one).
So, has anyone done something similar? What's the easiest way to do it?
James
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Maths with Microsoft Excel 2007: 85 times 77.1 = 65535 . Hint: this isn't
even true on Seasame Street.
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