WP:DYK + identi.ca -> enwpdidyouknow

I decided to write a script to convert Wikipedia’s main page Did you know? (DYK) updates into identi.ca friendly messages. The result is enwpdidyouknow. If you use identi.ca, you can subscribe and receive regular DYK goodness. If not, you can still subscribe to the RSS feed, although it will seem pretty weird as it is broken into messages of less than 160 characters. I should make it also produce just a regular atom or RSS feed without the message length limitation.

It’s run for 24 hours now and it seems to be working OK. It updates in batches because that’s how Template:did_you_know is updated (except by humans). When a message has to broken into 2, it posts them virtually together, but it always leaves a 2 minute gap between different messages, to stop flooding a little bit.

I put some info, including my source code, here: http://dyk2identica.modernthings.org/. It’s really rough and ready. No one will be too surprised to hear that by far the hardest bit was figuring out how to correctly parse the wikisyntax. :)

I should probably move it all to the toolserver. I haven’t figured out what license it is yet. Suggestions welcome.

Wikipedia + MediaWiki API + mwclient + enwp.org service + identica API = new article fun :)

18 August, 2008 • , ,

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