Opera's UNIX dev on how he uses wget and grep to read blog comments

http://my.opera.com/ruario/blog/show.dml/22004992

by Indyan • 16 years ago

62 15 16 years ago

my.opera.com

sucuri2• 16 years ago

Funny to see an Opera guy suggesting a way to browse the web without using Opera :) He even says it is easier to read all the comments that way (via text using curl / wget/ grep) instead of using their browser (not that I don't agree with him).

earnubs• 16 years ago

I'd say it's more a criticism of the design of comment threads than the browser.

DisposaBoy2• 16 years ago

If that's the case, shouldn't they/he be adding some functionality via plugin(or built-in) that improves the situation in Opera.

nettdata• 16 years ago

Yeah, but he's probably one of those guys that's still using Pine for his email.

famrey• 16 years ago

He isn't suggesting a way to browse the web without Opera.

He's suggesting a way to overcome design problems on a site.

vdm• 16 years ago

Take away: including permalinks for included bits of pages (such as comments) can be useful when they are crawled. Encouraging serendipity.

jlees• 16 years ago

Or just allowing a 'view all comments' option that could be easily Ctrl-Fd.

katovatzschyn• 16 years ago

Ruario maintains the Opera AUR entry for Arch Linux also, and does very good job of it so earns credit:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=10333

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33276

sfphotoarts• 16 years ago

Talk about wrong tools for the job. A far simpler to write, and more robust solution could be had many other way, simple_html in php for example, or javascript, any DOM parser will be more robust and easier to follow than all those sed/grep calls.

oconnore• 16 years ago

I don't think there is anything simple about learning PHP to find a few blog comments, or learning to use a 3rd party DOM parser when you are already familiar with tools that apparently work for this one-off application.

xtacy• 16 years ago

He's not alone. :-) Richard Stallman goes a step further as his laptop isn't directly connected to the internet.

  Quote: For personal reasons, I do not browse the web 
  from my computer.  (I also have not net connection
  much of the time.)  To look at page I send mail to
  a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to 
  me.  It is very efficient use of my time, but it 
  is slow in real time.

Source: http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/

zacharyvoase• 16 years ago

Great approach, but some work could have been saved (and robustness added) using the W3C’s HTML-XML-utils. For example, there’s hxselect, which filters HTML/XML against a CSS selector, and hxpipe, which breaks XML input into a more grep/awk-friendly format. I’ve used these tools myself on multiple occasions, they’ve saved me a huge amount of time.

Opera's UNIX dev on how he uses wget and grep to read blog comments

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