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!