

Opera's UNIX dev on how he uses wget and grep to read blog comments - Indyan
http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/show.dml/22004992

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katovatzschyn
Ruario maintains the Opera AUR entry for Arch Linux also, and does very good
job of it so earns credit:

<http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=10333>

<http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33276>

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sucuri2
Funny to see an Opera guy suggesting a way to browse the web without using
Opera :) He even says it is easier to read all the comments that way (via text
using curl / wget/ grep) instead of using their browser (not that I don't
agree with him).

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earnubs
I'd say it's more a criticism of the design of comment threads than the
browser.

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DisposaBoy
If that's the case, shouldn't they/he be adding some functionality via
plugin(or built-in) that improves the situation in Opera.

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burgerbrain
Why would you do that, if using wget and grep were easier?

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nl
Because if he needs to do that, then presumably other people have the same
problem, and I'd be reasonably sure at least some of them can't or aren't
prepared to use wget, sed & grep to find things they did in another program.

Browsers already have history, so it seems to me it would be logical to extend
that functionality to show how a page changed in response to an input
somewhere in your history.

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zacharyvoase
Great approach, but some work could have been saved (and robustness added)
using the W3C’s HTML-XML-utils. For example, there’s hxselect, which filters
HTML/XML against a CSS selector, and hxpipe, which breaks XML input into a
more grep/awk-friendly format. I’ve used these tools myself on multiple
occasions, they’ve saved me a huge amount of time.

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xtacy
He's not alone. :-) Richard Stallman goes a step further as his laptop isn't
directly connected to the internet.

    
    
      Quote: For personal reasons, I do not browse the web 
      from my computer.  (I also have not net connection
      much of the time.)  To look at page I send mail to
      a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to 
      me.  It is very efficient use of my time, but it 
      is slow in real time.
    

Source: <http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/>

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sfphotoarts
Talk about wrong tools for the job. A far simpler to write, and more robust
solution could be had many other way, simple_html in php for example, or
javascript, any DOM parser will be more robust and easier to follow than all
those sed/grep calls.

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oconnore
I don't think there is anything simple about learning PHP to find a few blog
comments, or learning to use a 3rd party DOM parser when you are already
familiar with tools that apparently work for this one-off application.

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vdm
Take away: including permalinks for included bits of pages (such as comments)
can be useful when they are crawled. Encouraging serendipity.

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jlees
Or just allowing a 'view all comments' option that could be easily Ctrl-Fd.

