I sent you this file in order to have your advice...

Last night I started playing around with an idea that I've wanted to implement for some time, an idea named the 'Perlmonks Threaded Article Viewer' (or PTAV).

My ultimate goal (assuming it doesn't turn into a GUP), is to have a mechanism where a user can 'subscribe' to a thread, and when a new node appears in the thread at or below the article subscribed to by the user, the user will receive some sort of notification (email, /msg, whatever).

In writing the bit of code that I did last night, I realized other than that basic functionality, I have no idea how I want to present the information that's available. So you can pick a year, a month, a day, see all the root level nodes for that day, select one of those, and see an indented list of replies. But so what? It's data, but it's not really information.

The data in the database is dates, authors, node types, and titles. There is no reputation, no article text. The program will always link back to Perlmonks for the actual article text, etc. This is useful to know when considering how this data might be put to use. And no, THERE IS NO REPUTATION INFORMATION.

Basically, I'm looking for some input on this idea. How can this data be manipulated so it becomes information? Sure, we could reimplement Super Search, but what good is that? Other than the subscription mechanism, can anything useful be done? I'm sure there's some statistical information that could be pulled out, but I'm not really looking for that kind of idea. Anything like that will go into the next update of the Stats Pages.

--Chris

And yes, I did steal the look'n'feel (such as it is) from Google