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RichardKennaway comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 08 September 2014 12:31PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 12 September 2014 05:45:16AM 3 points [-]

What do you see it doing that the web site doesn't?

Comment author: pshc 12 September 2014 08:50:23AM *  7 points [-]

Imagining:

  • Easy to read layout (I find myself doing a lot of zooming and panning in Mobile Safari)
  • Download articles and sequences for offline reading
  • Comments that are easy to read, vote on, and reply to on mobile, similar to e.g. popular reddit apps
  • Free as in beer and speech

Welcoming other features that would draw users, too. I have to wonder if there are open source Reddit clients I could adapt, given the forked codebase...

Comment author: philh 12 September 2014 12:39:38PM *  4 points [-]

I expect that forking a reddit client is the way to go for UI (if you don't have any in mind, I think AlienBlue and Reddit is Fun are probably worth looking into for this).

For the backend, reddit exposes itself through json, which LW doesn't seem to; e.g. http://www.reddit.com/user/philh/.json works, but http://lesswrong.com/user/philh/.json (and http://lesswrong.com/user/philh/overview/.json ) don't. I expect clients to mostly use this, so you'll need to rewrite those portions of the code.

Comment author: pshc 12 September 2014 07:31:35PM 2 points [-]

Turns out AlienBlue did release their original version as open source, but the code is four years out of date! Hmmm.

Yeah, I would probably end up scraping the HTML. I filed a bug about .json being broken two years ago, but even if it were fixed, it seems that LW has quite a few customizations that the JSON output likely has not caught up to...

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