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2 points by hjek 1947 days ago | link | parent

> 2. Are you building a file transfer service? Or are you imagining that people will want to share files on a HN-like website? I'm not sure why that would be a common use case.

File upload wouldn't make sense on HN, Arc Forum or Lobsters, and I get that it's entirely on purpose that it's not present on those sites.

But I've been hosting a News site, and those of my friends who use it often submit links to something they've put on Dropbox or Google Drive, so I'm simply observing that this use case is present and that file upload is missing on my site. Perhaps it's because it's a different type of exchanges: a guitarist uploading a recording of a Charlie Parker solo, an artist uploading a drawing, etc.

Well, perhaps I should be using $CRAPPY_PHP_CMS_WITH_FILE_UPLOAD instead of News, but why can't I have well-structured content and file uploads at the same time?

It's also about future extensibility, ways of presenting these file uploads that I haven't thought about yet. I do occasionally write PHP for money. I don't have a very high opinion of that language, and I'd rather make something from scratch in Racket than write it as a Drupal plugin. Given the relative quantities of Drupal plugins and Racket web apps, that might be an unpopular opinion, but it shouldn't seem too strange on this forum. I'd prefer to make custom interactive web sites by extending a code base in Racket rather than PHP.

It's actually also for the use-case of being off-the-grid, yet needing to send/receive files to people in the same room, but not being able to find a USB stick. That situation happens surprisingly often for me. A zero-config web app is useful here because everyone have a browser on their computer (whereas not everyone have FTP / SSH / SMB).

> 1. Are you trying to build an RSS reader? Or do you want to support RSS versions of pages on your site?

I plan to do both. Building a social RSS reader integrated in a News-like app. And this News-like app would provide RSS feeds in the same way Anarki does. I image it wouldn't be too difficult.