pcgiwebnews.txt

pcgiwebnews.py

Jim Tittsler, Jim.Tittsler@tpc.ml.org

http://starship.python.net/crew/jtittsler/

1999.05.09

pcgiwebnews is a Persistent CGI program for accessing an NNRP news
server and rendering the article list and the articles in a three pane
HTML view.  It was written to provide an alternative means of accessing
our community news server for those that are prohibited by firewalls from
using a real news client, or for people that just want to sample the
groups and are intimidated by setting up a news client.

pcgiwebnews uses part of the Bobo object publishing technique that
was a precursor to Zope.  It effectively treats the news server as
an underlying database.

Access to some newsgroups can require authentication.  This can be
accommodated by pcgiwebnews by building in account (A=) and password
(P=) parameters in the newsgroup URLs.

The user posts articles by mailing them to a mail-to-news gateway.
This allows him to use the features of his mail client (like
spell checking), rather than forcing him to enter data into an
HTML textbox.

Because of resource constraints on the machine where pcgiwebnews was
originally hosted, the "front page" that initially greets the user is
periodically updated by a cron job (ngupdate) rather than being
*live*.  ngupdate looks through a list of static HTML files for lines
that match the newsgroup table and updates the number of articles
posted in the past 1/7/21 days.  This reduces load at the expense of
not having the absolute latest information on the number of articles
for each group.  It would be worthwhile to make the front page *live*
and also to keep track of articles seen by the user (with cookies or
login) to highlight new messages.

.. PCGI http://starship.python.net/crew/jbauer/persistcgi/index.html
.. Bobo http://www.digicool.com/
.. Example installation  http://www.tpc.ml.org