I’m in the middle of (slowly) developing the new version of bhread. Some ideas pop up in my head while developing. Some are new, some are old but I have forgotten.
See table of contents for outline, details in their sections. These are sorted by priority, high (top) to low.
An embeddable comment section
Before I started creating Bhread, I was looking for a comment section solution for my blog. I couldn’t find anything good enough. There was Disqus which feels too bloated to me design-wise. I might be wrong, there may be some possible customizations but I didn’t bother to try when I heard of some privacy concerns people have over it.
The other alternative is to use github for comments. It may be a viable solution but the fact that it depends on github feels unnatural to me.
Sometimes, comments can be valuable. As an internet user, you’ll benefit having these kinds of small details from comments being exposed to the world.
My proposal is to allow blogs that participate in bhread to enable each post of a blog to have a section that will display replies from other blogs for each post.
Per-post RSS Feed
Notifications are complex. Rss feeds can handle that. The plan is to add an rss feed for each post so that anyone can “follow” the post even without an account. This makes your notifications opt-in which you may or may not want.
Set polling time of feed if verified
I want to enforce politeness into hubs as much as I can. I plan on letting users with verified accounts to control the interval of scanning of each of their feeds. As I write this, I realized this setting must also be exposed to other hubs. Maybe, I shouldn’t bother with this. Maybe this belongs to the Atom or RSS feed spec.
List of invalid feeds
Moderation will be a problem. We want to keep a list of invalid feeds that other hubs and possibly other services may use. This list will be useful for identifying which feeds are not direct sources.
List of valid feeds
I’m not too keen on implementing this. But the plan is to expose an endpoint that lists all the feeds that the hub is scanning. This works in combination with the invalid feeds list.
Authentication
Sign in to a different hub from a hub Not sure if this should be implemented because we could expose a list of registered feeds anyway.
The idea is to allow any hub to spawn a new window to a bhread login page. On successful login, the window will emit an event containing auth information. This way, accounts work accross all hubs. The problem I see is that one cannot be fully certain of how other hubs will implement this plus the difficulty of making this secure and maintaining it makes me want to not pursue this.