[ckan-discuss] Idea: Mini-site creator

Tue Sep 13 20:38:36 BST 2011

On 6 September 2011 06:02, David Read <david.read at okfn.org> wrote:
> On 31 August 2011 00:13, Tim McNamara <tim.mcnamara at okfn.org> wrote:
>> I would like people's feedback and assistance to create a static site
>> generator that basis itself on tags/searches from CKAN instances. The
>> application searches for particular tags, then downloads (caches) the
>> data for every package. It then builds a static site with an index
>> page and pages for each package. Almost exactly like CKAN, only
>> topic-specific and read only. Finally, it uploads the static HTML to
>> Dropbox or similar. I thought the generator could be run in the
>> background and checks to see if anything has changed each minute or
>> so.
>>
>
> Hi Tim,
> This is a really interesting new outlet for CKAN! I can't wait to hear
> how this develops.
>
> James and David have been discussing an idea for the past couple of
> months about a way to show a subset of a CKAN simply with the domain
> name, and I wonder if this would be useful for your use case? So,
> perhaps you go to london-riots.thedatahub.org which filters data by
> that which has the tag 'london-riots'. You could even register/add
> datasets at this sub-site and it would apply this tag by default.

Hi David, this is exactly what I had in mind.

I spent about 10h last week trying build a tool from scratch. I
thought I would be clever, minimise dependencies and finally try
learning the actual DOM API. I think I learned what other people have
learned: minidom is yuck.

I'm now much more inclined to write some script that drives a
purpose-built tool, like Hyde: http://hyde.github.com/