
Library News (HN for Libraries) - gluejar
http://news.librarycloud.org/news
======
sktrdie
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?

~~~
mjdwitt
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.

~~~
sktrdie
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.

~~~
mjdwitt
_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.

~~~
sktrdie
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?

~~~
mjdwitt
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.

------
seppo0010
No RSS? :(

