Haskell books index with RSS
Dear Café, I have often wished that I could subscribe to RSS feeds that notify me when new books are published about a certain topic or by a certain author. I recently implemented the idea in the article system of my personal website and created an index of Haskell books. https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books The index provides a simple UI for browsing by tag, and each book page has basic information and links. By subscribing to the following RSS feed, you get a notification when a new book is added to the index. https://www.extrema.is/articles/tag/index:haskell-books.rss This is a humble first implementation, but I am posting here in case others find it useful. Regards, Travis
Hey Travis, Cool idea! Just curious, what does the free tag means? Given that I see it, say, on Haskell in Depth, it's not free as in free beer, I gather. -- Best, Artem On Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 1:59 AM Travis Cardwell via Haskell-Cafe < haskell-cafe@haskell.org> wrote:
Dear Café,
I have often wished that I could subscribe to RSS feeds that notify me when new books are published about a certain topic or by a certain author. I recently implemented the idea in the article system of my personal website and created an index of Haskell books.
https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books
The index provides a simple UI for browsing by tag, and each book page has basic information and links. By subscribing to the following RSS feed, you get a notification when a new book is added to the index.
https://www.extrema.is/articles/tag/index:haskell-books.rss
This is a humble first implementation, but I am posting here in case others find it useful.
Regards,
Travis _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
Hi Artem, On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 4:43 AM Artem Pelenitsyn wrote:
Cool idea!
Thanks!
Just curious, what does the free tag means? Given that I see it, say, on Haskell in Depth, it's not free as in free beer, I gather.
There were a lot of non-obvious design decisions to make in order to organize the Haskell books content, and this is one of them. I ended up using the "free" tag for all books that can be read in full without cost, including those that can only be read for free online. The "Haskell in Depth" book can be read from the publisher page: https://www.manning.com/books/haskell-in-depth I see the following in the left column on that page: FREE You can see this entire book for free. Click the table of contents to start reading. Clicking that takes you to the table of contents, a little bit further down the page. Clicking on any of the chapter or section titles opens the book in a modal interface. I still think that this usage is the best of the possibilities that I have thought of, but it can indeed be puzzling. Sorry about that! If you would like to see the meaning of any other tags, I explicitly define them on the meta page: https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books/meta#tags Cheers, Travis
Very nice, thanks. 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.
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!
participants (3)
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Artem Pelenitsyn -
Gregory Guthrie -
Travis Cardwell