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

[katovatzschyn]

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

[sucuri2]

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]

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

[famrey]

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

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

[nettdata]

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

[zacharyvoase]

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.

[xtacy]

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/

[sfphotoarts]

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]

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.

[vdm]

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

[jlees]

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