[TW5] Google sheets as a tiddlywiki commenting system

[Jed Carty]

As part of the bootstrapping process for TWederation I made a simple widget that sends xmlhttprequests so that we can have people submit information to a google form using a native tiddlywiki interface instead of the embedded iframes we used before. It turns out that you can also retrieve information from google sheets by url. We could use this to create a commenting system with an interface completely in wikitext that uses xmlhttprequest to take comments and store them in a google sheet and then the wiki author could then retrieve comments and add them (or not) to their wiki automatically. The problem is parsing the returned data. You can get it in json format too. Figuring out how to properly parse the output for comments is probably the biggest hurdle at the moment and I am not going to spend much time on it until I have more done with twederation, so this is mainly to let people know this works in case anyone wants to use this to make a commenting system. It shouldn't be too hard once you get the parsing part figured out.

Some notes for anyone interested (or me in case no one else does this and I come back looking for it):

The url to get the json object is in the form:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/1_2XHTLmoJB_SXZflvxPc5RD1bB2gWi364pqfzVeovIw/od6/public/full?alt=json

The big random string is the worksheet key. The worksheet needs to be set as public for this to work. You can submit data through a form and xmlhttprequest to forms that aren't public, but you have to have a publicly viewable form to pull comments off of it automatically. We may want this if people want to have a twederation wiki blog and allow people without wikis to leave comments.

Each row in the returned json object will be a row, property names are set by the first row of the spreadsheet. The json object is a horrible mess, good luck with that.

I hope someone can make use of this.