So, when I need breaks from the book, I've been poking around at NewsRiver customizations in decafbadNewsRiver.root for "fun" programming. You can check out the Release Notes I have so far, but here are a few highlights:

• News items can be filtered by Reading List, and a "Further Reading" list of links to view by filter are displayed at the end of the page after all the news.
• I've split just about all the HTML out of the news rendering code into separate templates, for the start of a switchable theme system. These themes can be somewhat self-contained, allowing you to make extensive changes to how the news items are presented, without needing to dig into the core suite of code.
• I stole preferences code from NewsRiver itself to facilitate selecting a theme. It's actually quite slick and nice to work with.
• The first theme is based on the aggregator UI I've been working on since my AmphetaOutlines days, running up through my miniagg implementation. Check out a screenshot of miniagg - that's pretty much how decafbadNewsRiver looks right now.

Lots and lots of bugs, miles and miles away from any sort of release I want to make, but it's been neat poking at this UserTalk stuff again, even with the usual creaks and ancient lizard brain corners I've run into. I daresay that, while UserTalk and the whole stack isn't as nice to me as Python, it's quite a bit more satisfying than PHP.