Running Weblogs with Slash

The Slash Publishing Cycle

Like living organisms, political movements, and dot-com startups, Slash Stories have a well-defined life cycle (see Figure 1-11). They are born (usually as user submissions), they mature (when published by an Author), they live productively for a while (as users add comments and moderate those comments), and, after a full life, they go to heaven (are archived, where no more comments can be added).

Figure 1-11. The life cycle of a Slash Story and comments

Most Slash sites operate somewhat like community newspapers. The people in a small town have a number of shared concerns that arise from living in the same legal jurisdiction, in the same school district, and so on. A small-town newspaper serves as both a mirror held up to that community and a speakers’ platform for the people to conduct public business and make their voices heard. Readers can write letters to the editor or opinion essays for the editorial page, or just call the attention of the newspaper staff to issues they feel deserve coverage. In the case of a Slash site, the common unifying factor of its audience is less likely to be geographic proximity than a social or technical topic of common interest, but Slash sites (and other kinds of public weblogs) provide the same mechanisms of reportage and discussion that a good small-town newspaper provides for its community.

A Story usually starts off as a user submission. Each Slash page has a SubmitStory link where anyone, even Anonymous Users, can suggest a story to the site Authors. This can be as simple as a URL to something interesting elsewhere on the web or as complex as a 4,000-word essay in plain text or jazzy HTML. Submitted stories live in a database table. Site Authors view this queue of submissions, choosing which stories to publish. Slash can be configured to allow the public to view the submission queue. Normally only the Authors can see it.

Site Authors can select, preview, edit, and publish user submissions when they’re satisfied. New Stories appear at the top of the list on the homepage and on the homepage of their respective Sections. A Story ages and moves further down the homepage as newer Stories are posted. Eventually, it slides off the main page, becoming a headline in the Older Stuff Slashbox before leaving the front page entirely. Older articles are still available through the site’s Search facility and the OlderArticles link in Older Stuff.

Slash allows users to comment on Stories. Comments resemble “Letters to the Editor” in a newspaper or magazine. While a traditional editorial staff must evaluate the feedback and choose what to publish, Slash makes this feedback immediately available, if the site administrator allows it. Readers can do their own evaluation through the comment moderation system. A particularly insightful or funny comment will garner moderation points from appreciative readers and move up in the moderation rankings; obtuse, off-topic, or flameworthy posts will lose points and subside into invisibility.

Eventually, the Story is no longer current news. With new Stories published all the time, fewer people read and comment on the older Stories. After living for a certain number of days (set by the site administrator), the dailyStuff program, run nightly by the slashd daemon process, accompanies the Story to its heavenly rest. The Story becomes a static web page with its comments to date, in flat form. It is still viewable, but no longer alive. No new comments can be added. Think of the Story as having been embalmed and put on display, like V. Lenin or W. Disney—informative, and hence still useful, but no longer dynamic and vital.