09.28.05

RSS Feeds from MediaWiki

Posted in tech at 3:22 am by mridley

As I posted previously, I’ve setup a wiki page for the Daily Source Code shownotes. So far it seems to be working out quite well, however a lot of people are responding that they want the shownotes in the RSS feed. Understandable.


I have been looking into the details of how to do this, and it turns out to be a bit more involved than I had hoped. There is some limited RSS support in MediaWiki for syndicating things like recent changes. I think this functionality could be extended to offer a category-specific RSS feed and probably we could even hack it to include enclosures. Unfortunately that won’t solve the problem.

The great downside of wikis is the same as the great upside. Anyone can edit them. I don’t think it’s practical on the wild and wooly Internet for a podcaster to allow anyone to edit their RSS feed on a whim. No good can come of that.

It’s OK, though. I have another plan. I am working on some utilities to grab the shownotes out of the wiki and parse them and generate the RSS feed independent of MediaWiki. Down the line I suspect other podcasters besides Mr. Curry may want to have this wiki shownotes functionality, so I’m trying to keep an architecture that will be scalable and broadly useful.

One of the roadblocks I’m running into is that it’s hard to find a parser for MediaWiki wikitext. This really surprised me. I figured it would be quite simple to find a little perl script that would parse the wikitext and output HTML. But it’s not. I could write one myself (and I may), but writing a parser is a somewhat involved undertaking.

Of course there is obviously a parser in MediaWiki itself, so it may turn out that I’ll just repurpose that code but again it’s not quite as simple as copy and paste. Still I think that would retain the maximum amount of compatibility, since that way the HTML will render exactly as it does on the wiki page. If anyone has any thoughts or knows of any standalone wikitext paser apps I’m all ears!

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Viewing 3 Comments

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    I think the best solution would be to use the initial show notes in the podcast feed (the same "outline"-style notes that Adam was giving us before) and then use that outline as the start of the wiki page. The show notes in the podcast feed do not need to be as detailed as the wikicurrently is - just a brief outline of what's in the show. Discussions and expanded details (copies of emails, other relevant links not mentioned in the show, etc) can be added to the wiki after the fact - that's where I would see the true benefits of a wiki attached to a podcast.

    Just my two cents' worth...
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    Amos-

    I agree with you, except that it seems like Adam doesn't want to do shownotes himself at all. So that's where it gets tricky...

    -m
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    great... any progress here? i could really use some rss feeds for any give page in mediawiki... i really debated rolling out mediawiki, esp. for ACL support etc which is better inother wikis... but i thought, common, its mediawiki! to my suprise, rss feed generations sucks. I might just throw up another wiki for that part...

    ill help however i can (testing perhaps docu) if you end up working on something.
 

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