alan little’s weblog

weblog design (1) - sidebar links

4th August 2003 permanent link

Part One of a series of design notes which will grow into a functional spec for Alan’s Personal Weblogging Tool. (Which needs a better name). I will be building the functional spec in parallel with the code. Yay. Evolutionary Software Design.

Sidebar links. This is an area where I want to try to do fancy stuff that I don’t think any if the available weblogging tools do.

• Auto-generate sidebar links for each item from the things I’ve linked to in the item text.
  • If an item is on more than one page, which many items quite easily could be - a “main” weblog page, a dedicated page for the item, one or more category pages, a chronological archive page - then I might want different sidebar links depending on what page the item is being shown on - just one of two key ones for multi-item pages, all of them if the item has a page of its own.
  • Auto-generate won’t be easy because I might not want the sidebar URLs and link text to be exactly as in the article. For example if I’ve linked to an item in somebody else’s weblog, I would probably want the sidebar link to be to their main weblog page not to the individual item. Having a resaonable stab at truncating URLs and checking the shortened version might be just about within my coding abilities - but I might also not want the same link text, and generating different link text automatically is definitely beyond my coding ability.
• I could, of course, check if I’ve linked to the same site before and default to the same URL and sidebar link text I used last time.
• Pages for individual items should also (by default, switchable) inherit sidebar links from any categories they are assigned to.
• Category-level sidebar links can be defined manually, or by automatically “promoting” to category level any sidebar links that are used in more than a certain number or percentage of posts in the category.

related entries: Programming

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