In DK3, series diaries were often marked by a tag. We have tags for OND, Readers & Book Lovers, Top Comments, WYFP, and the like.
In DK4, a diary series can be run as a group. We have groups for Overnight News Digest, Readers and Book Lovers, Top Comments, WYFP?, and the like.
This diary features a computer program that group editors can use to automatically import all diaries having any specific tag, into their group.
Requirements
The program needs a Mac or a Linux to run. More precisely, it requires Perl. Perl happens to be the programming language that Daily Kos is built with.
Difficulty
You need to be able to run a simple command line program. Instructions below.
How It Works
You tell the program your Daily Kos user name, your Daily Kos password, the tag you want to import, and the group you want to republish the diaries as. The program logs in as you, finds the diaries with the tag, puts those diaries on the group queue, and then publishes them for the group.
Effect on Your Followers Stream
Little or none. You will be importing dozens or hundreds of old diaries. But the stream view only shows recent diaries. You won't clog your group follower's streams by running the program.
Where Best to See the Results
After running the program, go to your group List View. The list or history view is described in a KosBusters diary, the Diary History View.
- In the group list view, the newly republished diaries will be sorted by actual publication date.
- In the group blog view, the newly republished diaries will show up at the top.
Because of this effect on the blog view, if your group wants to import old tagged diaries into the group, whether manually or automatically, it is best done sooner than later.
What Gets Imported
The diaries to be imported are those found on the tag pages for the tag. E.g., see the tag pages for Income Inequality Kos, or KosAbility, or Top Comments.
How to Get the Program
You can copy and paste the program from a Google doc. I've found that using their "Download as" mangles it somehow, so you have to select it all, copy it, paste it into a text editor or a word processor, and be sure to save it as plain text.
Or message me here, or email me, and I'll send you the program back in an email attachment. My email: gschure at gmail dot com
How to Install the Program
Save the program to a file on your computer. Fire up a command line terminal. Change to the directory where you put the program. Make the program executable. Now you are ready to run it.
Note: if you save the program to your home directory,
you avoid having to change directories to use it.
Instructions for Use
Fire up a command line terminal. For a Mac, this is Finder -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app. Change to the directory where you put the program. Run the program approximately so:
You must tell the program your Daily Kos user name, your Daily Kos login password, the group you want to republish to, and the tag you want to import. If you don't specify your password on the command line, the program will prompt you for it.
You can also specify an editor's note to add to all the diaries, using the
--note "This is my editor's note"
option. On your group blog view, an editor's note might look like this.
You can do a test run to import a limited set of diaries, if you want to check how things look before proceeding with the whole set. To import only ten diaries, specify --max 10.
By default, the program is taciturn. The program doesn't say anything unless it gets in trouble. You can change this with the --verbose switch.
Program help is available with the --help switch. The help text looks like this.
Command Line Basics
To use the program, you need the most basic of command line ability: Make the program executable; Run it.
When you fire up a terminal, you will be in your home directory. There will be a $ prompt. Type commands after the prompt, then hit enter to run them. You can just close the terminal window in the normal way when you are done.
One command line guide for the Mac is here.
KosBusters! is a group of DK4 beta testers who decided to continue bug hunting and feature testing now that DK4 is the official platform of Daily Kos.
In addition to locating bugs and testing newly released features, we plan to post informational diaries—such as this one—to aid everyone in using and navigating the site. If you have any questions, we are happy to answer them as best we know how. We are not currently accepting new members.
Previously, from KosBusters: