Eccentric Flower:200906/Feeding Time
From Eccentric Flower
Feeding, Time
So, about RSS and that sort of thing.
MediaWiki has RSS and Atom support built in, as astute observers have noticed. However, what those do is give you syndication of the Recent Changes page, and not very good syndication at that.
Apparently you can't filter the output at all - so, for example, you can't get it to show just recent changes to the "Eccentric_Flower:" namespace where the journal lives. Yes, you can select this as an option on the Recent Changes page, along with other tricks like only showing a certain number of days back and so on ... but the instant you add the "and spit that out as RSS, plzthx" parameter, it ignores all your other choices.
Also, the format of the output is the incremental-differences format you'll see if you ever need to compare two versions of a page in MediaWiki. This makes for some mighty odd-looking RSS. Don't take my word for it. Go to a page where RSS appears in the toolbox on the left, click it, and see what you get.
Essentially, the RSS and Atom feeds built into MediaWiki were intended for Wikipedia editors to keep track of who was changing what pages where. They aren't really very good as a syndication tool per se. A number of people have realized this over the years, and have written extensions to MediaWiki designed to address this problem.
Yesterday I sorted through most of them and found them inadequate. They were all designed for specific needs by specific people, and many of them did not correspond with my own needs very well. Some of them were no longer supported. At least one of them plain didn't work when I tried installing it, and broke all my pages for about five minutes yesterday afternoon.
But I eventually did find one that worked, once I stopped looking for buzzwords like RSS and started looking for things like "newsfeed." Not that this site is news, but it turns out that news syndication is closer to what I was trying to do.
(Incidentally, if you are a MediaWiki user/hacker and you want to see exactly what extensions I'm using and what modifications I have made by hand, that list is kept here.)
Anyhow. So. I have installed an RSS feed. It does not export the contents of these entries, just the titles and dates. This is deliberate. It is meant as a reminder these entries exist, not an alternate way to read them. Nonelvis has, in turn, converted this into a LiveJournal feed, which is called columbina_rss. We have neither of us tested it extensively - I, for one, am on the edge of my seat about whether it's automatically going to pick up this entry once I post it. But that's where the experimentation is heading.
You may also like to examine Special:NewsChannel, which will generate a feed and a pickup URL for that feed, should you care to roll your own for some reason.
I am feeling an acute pinch in time for reasons that have nothing to do with work for the first time in a long while. I suppose it's a nice feeling, in some minuscule, silver-liningish way, to have a lot of non-work stuff I want to do for a change, but on the whole I think it's worse to have personal tasks hanging over your head than work tasks, because if you don't get them done you have to answer to yourself - and I don't know about you, but I'm the meanest and most unforgiving boss I will ever have.
Anyway, while work-work hasn't ground to a halt by any means, we're sort of in that period of calm and relaxation between winding up the school year and getting down to the summer tasks. There's stuff to do, but no one is in a tearing hurry. Meanwhile, on the home front, I want to:
- Find a way to scan in a lot of old photos
- Restore my MP3 collection, which was completely lost in the drive crash, from divers sources
- Write a story based on something I pulled out of the old files
- Finish this web site
and I want to balance this with other things in my life, such as playing LOTRO often enough to satisfy that itch and keep Mel from killing me, and also doing, you know, the occasional thing, like rock climing this Friday.
There are not enough hours.
