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Library News (HN for Libraries)

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39 pointsgluejar7 comments

Are you using the news.arc script that HN itself is using? I wonder, how easy was it to install? I can't find much info online about it... what database does it use?

It's written in pg's arc lisp, which you can find at arclanguage.org. The install instructions there are a bit dated, however, as you can now download arc3.1 instead of 3.0 as they say to do.

Once you have that installed, running news.arc is detailed in a rather simple text file labeled how-to-run-news. Edit: Note that it's not quite the same version that is running here at HN; pg has modified this version slowly over time.

Right, but what if you want to make changes? There's like barely any documentation and I have no clue how the requests are handled nor where the data is stored.

barely any documentation

Ah, I've only recently begun to overcome that myself. Even though the docs at files.arcfn.com/doc are a bit dated (they were written at version 2) I found them to be one of the only resources besides pg's minimal tutorial. You could also try anarki as well; it has a useful help function that prints some documentation for many of its functions and macros. You can clone the anarki repo from github.com/nex3/arc.

how the requests are handled

Look for the defop statements in news.arc. I don't know news.arc as well as I know the blog.arc file, but there's probably a statement that begins with something like

    (defop news req
      ; ...
      )

nor where data is stored

There should be a variable defined in news.arc named

    arcdir*

and another named

    staticdir*

I'm not entirely sure how posts and comments are stored as files for news.arc, but they're probably stored as templates in a folder inside the arc directory. Any images or css files that you want to use need to be kept in the static directory, typically named static. When you reference images or css from you page definitions, you'll need to treat the static directory as the root of your server.

Hope that helps; I know the community is kind of a mess for arc.

The documentation page actually helps, thanks. Interesting that the entire DB serving this site is made out of flat files. Arc looks interesting, I'll give it a try if it's not too painful installing it. Would you know of a another less painful, very minimalist, web oriented lisp dialect?

Installation shouldn't be too hard. The instructions say that it only runs on top of mzscheme-372, but I've heard that 3.1 runs on top of the latest versions of plt. I haven't tested that, however.

Would you know of another less painful, very minimalist, web oriented lisp dialect?

Unfortunately, no. As much of a joy as it is to program in Arc Lisp, development of the official branch seems dead and I have some doubts about anarki's stability.

No RSS? :(

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