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[10/27/2022 @19:00]: Thinking about threading.

Several years ago I wanted to have a way to share short thoughts, and found items (links, images, and the like) on my website. Most of the website is made up of markdown files that render into HTML and while this isn't difficult to update on a real computer it is cumbersome on what passes for the state of the art in mobile operating systems these days so I wanted something that I could post to using a web browser. I ended up building the resulting microblog system out of several Microsoft Azure services, namely Functions, Storage Tables, and Storage Blobs. Later, when I built this Gemini capsule I wanted to bring that content across so I wrote a Python program that fetches the data from the API and renders it out to gemtext and an Atom feed.

The microblog, republished to Gemini

The generator source

Since I launched the microblog, I've wanted to add threading to the otherwise linear model. Recently I got the motivation to start and over the last couple of days I've been working on adding the infrastructure needed. The backend was simple, adding an attribute to each Thought that points to the ID of another Thought (called naturally -- In-Reply-To). I then added several functions to the API to organize collections of Thoughts into threads based upon that metadata. Finally I have started providing a threaded display to the various interfaces that render Thoughts to readers. The first one to get a threaded view was the RSS feed as that is simply another Function in Azure. This made it easy to update and while I was in there I added a cache mechanism backed by Storage Blob. The next was to update the static generator for my Gemini capsule. I somewhat chickened out here and just added a display to each Thought that includes the date/time of the Thought that is being replied to. It doesn't sort as nicely as the RSS feed but it was the simplest change and since gemtext doesn't have multiple levels of blockquote or other ways to easily denote depth it seemed the most logical solution.

I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on alternatives, understanding that these are threads in the e-mail or news sense not in the Twitter sense so you can totally have constructs that look like this.

 A -\
    +- B
    |  +- D
    |     +- F
    |     +- G 
    |  +- E
    +- C

Though frankly I don't think they'll ever get quite that complex unless I start going quite mad.

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