Infrastructure

Before we continue thinking about this, I would like to hear about the origin of this task. Who asked for this?

Personally I find this feature completely useless. The fact that the feature on Planet GNOME has apparently been broken for a long time tells me that nobody is using it. It smells of a solution looking for a problem, really.

These planet-type applications aim to provide a curated experience of feed reading. A change like this would be a hacky move towards personalised feed management.

In the case that some real actual person wants this, I would not try to hack this on top of our existing planet, but look into Pluto and make a feature request for it: https://github.com/feedreader

The more I think about this, the more I want to say WONTFIX. Anyone needing this level of control should subscribe to TDF planet using a dedicated feed reader and do the filtering there. There are plenty of options in this space, not only for desktop & mobile, but self-hosted web apps and browser extensions.

Before we continue thinking about this, I would like to hear about the
origin of this task. Who asked for this?

Me :-)

Personally I find this feature completely useless. The fact that the
feature on Planet GNOME has apparently been broken for a long time tells
me that nobody is using it. It smells of a solution looking for a
problem, really.

[..]

In the case that some real actual person wants this, I would not try to
hack this on top of our existing planet, but look into Pluto and make a
feature request for it: https://github.com/feedreader

If it's broken on Planet GNOME, I am indeed sceptical about replicating
it on our system. However, I don't mind giving our Planet a revamp. Can
we setup a Pluto test instance and have a look? If it at the same time
improves the design and responsiveness of the page, that'd be a win!

Backend changes needed to build something similar to the GNOME solution:

1. The <div class="channelgroup"> elements need an additional class name to associate them with the author. Could be just a lowercased author name with spaces replaced with underscores, examples: libreoffice_design_blog, official_tdf_blog
2. Daily cron job generating an authors.js file having an object like this containing all the authors:
var authors = {
"libreoffice_design_blog": "LibreOffice Design Blog",
"official_tdf_blog": "Official TDF Blog",
};

I can prototype this offline already on the client side.

Scratch that number 2 from my previous comment. We already have the authors list visible in the sidebar, so there is no need for much gymnastics. This is enough:

The li elements should have classes corresponding to the blog authors like

<li class="libreoffice_design_blog">

Thanks for fixing my mistakes!

Regarding escape() and unescape(), apparently we should not be using them, but rather these:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURI
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURIComponent
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/decodeURI
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/decodeURIComponent

It seems there are gotchas with all of them, though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75980/when-are-you-supposed-to-use-escape-instead-of-encodeuri-encodeuricomponent

Regarding escape() and unescape(), apparently we should not be using them, but rather these:

Thanks for the links (my JS-fu isn't stellar :-P), replaced encode() (resp. decode()) with encodeURIComponent() (resp. decodeURIComponent()) as its semantics seem appropriate for this use-case.