Ambitious (for me) idea !

[AndyP]

This idea is ambitious because my knowledge of perl is limited, but here goes...

I posted recently about a news tagging idea that I've seen work on other sites. Basically the idea is that visitors reading a story on your site can tag or associate key words with that story. Other visitors can come to the site and run a search based on those key words. This kind of member interactivity has proven popular in sites that I have visited and I'd like to try and create something similar for Coranto.

Here is the basic idea :

Each news story will have a link that when clicked will pop up a window. Inside of that window will be a form generated by Coranto with some hidden fields. The hidden fields will be the ID of that story (in my case 'newstime'), the title and the link to the story. The one field that will be visible which visitors can post into will be the key words which can be typed into the text box.

The form will then send the data off to a flat file database which can then be searched producing a list of stories relevant to the user depending on the words they search for.

This is the basic outline of the idea and I'm curious to get some feedback on this from any cgi or Coranto experts. Is this an idea that would be easy to create ?

My basic proposal is to keep the database separate to the db's that Coranto uses (just in case something goes wrong). When a user adds more key words to news item that is already in the db it should add those words to the same entry as opposed to creating a second entry in the db.

I already have a script that lets me fill out a form and add data into a flat file db. It also has a form that allows me to search the db. That part isn't perfect yet because it doesn't allow the kind of update to the db that I am hoping to achieve... but obviously this can be adapted I hope.

Any feedback on this idea is appreciated.

[Dale Ray]

Andy,

I moved this to Addon Requests from Addon Releases, since you haven't released anything yet. There really isn't a perfect fit for topics like this one.

Thanks for your interest in developing for Coranto. I think that what you want to do will have use for non-Coranto sites also.

[Musicvid]

This idea does need to be developed. One important use I can think of is to autolink search terms in the database to specific items on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

[AndyP]

Okay, just to update I think I have everything sorted out up to the stage where the key words are inserted into the database. The part after that, especially the bit about being able to present that information to the reader and being able to update the key words will be the part I get stuck at. I'll post more once I reach that stage.

[Lawrence]

Just a bit of supportive advice: use the 'newsid' not 'newstime'. The newstime is a timestamp from the system, two items posted at the same moment would cause problems. The 'newsid' is a translation of each number in the 'newstime' PLUS a random (close) string added on.

I like your idea alot.. good luck