A blogboard...
This is a stupid idea, but I wanted to share it because it is so dumb.
You may be familiar with imageboards and textboards. I was thinking about the way in which we communicate online, sometimes it feels to vapid, even things like forums can feel that way because they are not attached to the things we make as individuals (unless the forum is private). It is strange because decentralizing it somehow makes it more personal... I had a sudden idea... and I am drunk, so it may be a terrible idea...
My terrible idea:
You have a website which is both a webring and something I call a "blogboard." Now, this sounds stupid but let me explain how it works.
You have a server1 fetching RSS feeds from trusted blogs which have to go through a registration process. Each time a new element is added to one of the RSS feeds (indicating an update) the entry is given a Post ID. This Post ID, the Title and URL are saved on a database2. A value is set to true or false depending on a certain criterion, if yes, a value is saved (I will explain this later.) After that, the website's index is updated in counter chronological order, so newer post appear first — it uses the data from the RSS feed to create an HTML entry on an index of posts and also contains the generated Post ID.
Okay, so now you have an index of blog posts parsed from RSS feeds and a database containing the Title, Post ID and URL for each individual post. Let's say you want to reply to one blog. How do you do it? Do you leave a comment? Wrong! You need to make your own blog post in response to it. I got the idea from how YouTube used to have a video reply feature.
All right so how does it work? Well there are Post ID so if you want to reply to a post all you have to do is determine some sort of marker, like ">>" and then if the marker is contained in the RSS entry (the criterion I mentioned earlier) it saves the value next to it as the Reply ID. When the index is generated it also shows the ID of the posts it is replying to. Of course, how much does it show is dependent on how much you want the website to do, right?
Perhaps you want the website to be minimalist and just clicking the Reply ID uses the ID HTML element to auto-scroll the website (target the ID) of the element which contains a specific Post ID determined by the Reply ID. Or you can do some JavaScript bullshit that makes it so it opens an iframe or some stupid shit like that... or you could just make it link to the URL saved on the database for the determined Reply ID.
I don't know, this is dumb, fun idea though.
Actually, you don't even need a server... all of the things it contains are static so just a Python script and a static website host you can push updates to, lol... nothing is hosted on the actual website since it is just an index, and it doesn't need to parse user requests (although perhaps you would need to for automating registrations, otherwise adding new blogs would have to be a manual process.)↩
Depending on your implementation a database may not be needed, if the important values are contained as HTML elements, and they are not required in any other context (for example, targeting an ID element doesn't require access to any data outside of that which is already contained on the page) then there is no need for saving the values other than the last Post ID (so Post ID do not repeat).↩