Hello,
Apologies in advance if this isn't "tech" enough for wikitech-l.
I have written a perl script which parses
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements and creates an RSS
file suitable for a news aggregator. This was purely to scratch an itch: I'm
not a hugely regular contributor but I like to keep up-to-date on the
various announcements and found myself visiting that page a lot. Anyway,
this file is available at
http://jeays.net/wikipedia/announcements.xml and
is updated 4 times a day (therefore only adding 4 page views a day to the
server). If you don't have a news aggregator or similar software, the feed
might look something like this:
http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/build.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fjeays.net
%2Fwikipedia%2Fannouncements.xml&chan=yes&num=0&desc=yes&date=yes&preview=pr
eview+the+feed
Of course, since it's a wiki-editable page, it could well "break" every so
often. I've tried to make it reasonably robust, but I'm not expecting this
feed to be used for making earth-shattering decisions and I will try to fix
it if I notice it breaks.
I'm open to ideas / suggestions or different directions for this. I'm
perfectly willing to share what code I have, or update the RSS feed on the
wikipedia server instead, or other possibilities. However, I have a
reasonable amount of bandwidth per month available on my server, so I could
certainly handle a fair number of subscribers.
Regards,
Mark Jeays (Dze27 on Wikipedia)