On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 08:06:03 +0100, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Wikipedia has hundreds of wonderful portals on every imaginable topic. These are perhaps one of the most underexposed treasures on the site. It would be lovely if people could subscribe to a portal feed, or individual "boxes" (typical portal arrangement is into rectangles with different content). Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software
How could this be achieved? One way would be to support an RSS extension that would operate as follows:
<snip>
This is not exactly what you asked, but if you don't mind manualy editing the feed (you can use templates to ease the work). It's perfectly possible to create custum RRS feeds within the existing MediaWiki software. Just create a page (or subpage) somewhere with the raw XML code for the feed, then link to it with the options:
&action=raw&ctype=application/rss+xml
added to the end of the URL. See for example the "podcast" RRS put togeter by the English Wikipedia spoken articles project: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/rss&action=raw&ctype=application/rss+xml
The "normal" version of the page is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/rss, the XML looks like crap in HTML view naturaly, but with the added raw and content type parameters set it works like a charm (asuming you have a OGG capable software that can subscribe to feeds (I use Winamp)).