> Tom Purl wrote:
>>I just checked the Google Code site (http://code.google.com/hosting/),
>> and couldn't find a Vim or VimTips project. I'd try creating it, but I
>> feel like someone more "official" to the project should do so. I think
>> someone should do it before someone else takes the name (like some
>> malicious Emacs user :), even if the tips conversion script isn't done
>> yet.
>>
>> Otherwise, I'd be happy to do it and brag to my dorky friends about how
>> integral my efforts are to the Vim project ;)
> Tom: Were you thinking of creating the conversion script? And copying
> the web site tips into the wiki?
I haven't started something like that, but I would be happy to help with
such an effort. I've written a few wiki conversion scripts before
coincidentally.
> Does anyone know of some docs that might assist in this process? Does
> a wiki have a bulk import, or is it a matter of emulating what a
> person would type?
Here's the basic process as I see it:
1. Scrape the tips from vim.org. We can either scrape the HTML itself,
or pipe it through a tool like elinks to get formatted content (if that
ends up being easier to parse).
* I know that we can download a plain-text version of the tips as
some sort of tarball, but I don't think that version includes
comments.
2. Convert said content into a the wiki markup language that Google
likes to use. We can do this a variety of ways. I'm partial to python,
perl, and shell tools like sed and awk.
* We probably will want to create one text file for each tip.
3. Post a sample of some converted tips on the wiki and get community
"sign-off" (more or less).
4. Upload marked-up content to the Google wiki
* Google usually provides some sort of RPC api for this sort of
thing, but lacking that, a simple Perl script could do the job.
Honestly, the only "hard" part here is step 2, and we can host our
script(s) on Google code if we would like.
If it's ok with you guys, I would be happy to set up a Vim Tips project
on the Google code site and create a section for the conversion scripts.
I know that Bram said that he didn't want to set up the VimTips project
until we were ready convert content, but I think that it would be nice
to set it up very soon for the following reasons:
* We can host the scripts necessary to convert the tips there
* We can post examples of how the tips might look so we can gain
feedback
* We can take the name before some nefarious person decides to
Google-squat :)
So yeah, what do you guys think?
Thanks!
Tom Purl
