blogging

It would be possible to support rss enclosures for eg, podcasts, pretty easily.

Here is the last of those items. Using the meta plugin you can give the appropriate info, and the enclosure will be added to the entry. It will also add a tag at the top, but I don't know if this is necessary. It also includes a fix for when make is used without PREFIX.

http://jameswestby.net/scratch/podcast.diff

-- JamesWestby

Hmm. Not quite how I'd envisioned podcasts would work, my idea was more that the sound files would be kept inside the wiki, and the inline plugin could be told to eg, inline *.mp3, and would add those to the rss feed as enclosures. Maybe you'd also inline some regular blog pages to describe the files or the like.

Do you think that would work or that it's worth pursuing that approach? I haven't looked at podcasts enough to know if that method would be technically feasable; for one thing it would limit the blog items for podcasts to just having an enclosure but no description.

Even if that doesn't work and pages are needed to desribe the items like you did, it still seems better to keep the podcast items in the wiki..

--Joey

That's fair enough. I'm a little unsure of how it all works, so I just did the simplest thing I could.

You don't need a description for podcasts it seems. So there's nothing stopping you there.

I have another patch that I think does what you want. It only supports .mp3 files, .ogg or similar could be added easily.

It has the disadvantage that the filename is all there is to go on, as I can't think of a way to associate any information with the mp3 file. I don't want to add a dependency on a IDv3 tag library. You could add another file .mp3.info with the title/description in.

It's obviously up to you which way you want to go.

http://jameswestby.net/scratch/podcast2.diff

-- JamesWestby

Hmm, this could be taken a step further, and assume that if IkiWiki::pagetype doesn't return a defined page type for the page in the blog, then no matter the extension it should be fed into the rss feed in an enclosure. This would allow for not only podcasting, but vidcasting and a form of photo blogging. Or even an rss feed containing the source of ikiwiki.

--Joey

Yes I agree that this would be great, but rss2 spec says that enclosure must have mime-type. How about I use the File::MimeInfo trick from the first patch to do this? I don't know why I didn't do this before. This will probably clean the code up a little as well.

What do you think of the change that when using raw, if the filetype is not known it adds an entry anyway? I did this so that the entries appear if this mode is used. It might be that this is not necessary, as can we assume that people wont use raw if they want to pod/vid/whatevercast?

-- JamesWestby

Using File::Mimeinfo makes sense to me.

I think it probably makes sense to make the (html) blog page add an entry with a link to the file that's in the enclosure in the rss feed. Whether or not raw is being used.

Note: I'm still unsure about whether podcasts should support descriptions for the enclosures or not. Here's an early podcast that did use descriptions: http://static.userland.com/gems/backend/gratefulDead.xml Here's a contemporary podcast, which also uses descriptions: http://www.lugradio.org/episodes.rss

The podcast client I use certianly doesn't care about the descriptions. But it's podracer, probably not the thing most podcast users use.

--Joey

I tested with amarok, and that also ignored the description. I am thinking of those where you have a mixed feed, and people using clients that ignore enclsures get pretty much a blank post, with just the filename, and the html page, which also just displays the filename.

I don't think this is a big issue though, so I guess it's just which you think is the cleaner interface.

I have also added the first of your ideas as well (though you seem to have removed it). It adds a parameter to inline archive_after which limits showing full entries to that number.

http://jameswestby.net/scratch/limit.diff

-- JamesWestby

I removed it because I don't really see the need for it anymore. The added complexity doesn't seem worth it, unless someone needs the features. --Joey

And here is the updated podcast patch supporting any file type.

http://jameswestby.net/scratch/podcast2.diff

-- JamesWestby

And here is a patch for the remaining item. It adds links to the bottom of inlined entries for edit and discuss (if they are enabled). It doesn't add links for edit if the filetype is not known.

The stylesheet should probably be done slightly better than I have. I just added a bit of spacing as the links were too close to the date. I have no skill in this area though. Perhaps you would like to use the list system that you have for the links at the top.

http://jameswestby.net/scratch/actions.diff

-- JamesWestby

Thanks! I did tweak the css a bit. Not totally happy with it, but pretty good I think. (I'll try to get to the other patches soon.) --Joey

I'm very happy to report that this is done. Podcasting patch applied (finally!) --Joey