This is a Python program I made that creates RSS feeds of the latest featured articles, pictures of the day, selected anniversaries and Wikiquote's quote of the day. It runs every night at 02:05 UTC, and generates feeds at:

http://toolserver.org/~skagedal/feeds/fa.xml (featured articles; validate feed)
http://toolserver.org/~skagedal/feeds/potd.xml (picture of the day; validate feed)
http://toolserver.org/~skagedal/feeds/sa.xml (selected anniversaries; validate feed)
http://toolserver.org/~skagedal/feeds/qotd.xml (quote of the day; validate feed)

For the code, see the Github repository. Patches and all kinds of feedback are of course welcome!

The program was inspired by User:Dze27's featured article feed, but shows the latest 20 articles, not just today's article.

News

edit
  • 2008-12-12:
    • version now at 0.9.2
    • the feeds now validate as correct RSS.
    • the SA feed should now work better as each item have unique GUIDs
    • new feed: Wikiquote's "quote of the day"; also started work on Wiktionary's "word of the day"
    • import into subversion repository
    • fix bug: add hostname to links to "/w/index.php"
  • 0.9.1: (2008-12-10)
    • remove "surroundings" on POTD pages, now only the picture and description is in the feed (and a little link to the archive)
  • 0.9: (2008-12-10)
    • now runs on the Wikimedia Toolserver. The feeds at the old place point to this with multiple redirect mechanisms (HTTP header 301, RSS "redirect" tag, and a regular item if neither of the previous work), so I hope this won't cause much trouble. (Do readers actually update to the new URL, or do they keep accessing the old just to get the redirect...?)
    • remove html comments to reduce xml size
    • remove "footers" on FA feed (from "Recently featured:" on) and SA feed (from "More events:" on)
    • on SA feed, remove the "documentation" div
  • 0.8.3: fixed POTD, now working again (2008-09-01)
  • 0.8.2: correct URLs for wikilinks in articles (2008-08-16)
  • 0.8.1: updated for reorganization of POTD (2007-01-11)
  • 0.8: added support for selected anniversaries — could be made prettier...
  • 0.7: added support for picture of the day
  • 0.6: initial version

To do

edit
  • Use the render action (like this), to minimize traffic

Assumptions

edit

Since Fafafa generates feeds from Wikipedia HTML, it relies on the content being laid out in a specific way. If these assumptions no longer hold, the script will fail. When possible, it will fail "gracefully", so that the content is still there, but might not be pretty. The following is a few of the things Fafafa assumes:

See also

edit
  • Wikipedia:Syndication for other RSS feeds
  • WikiWidgets is a Android widget that (currently) uses these feeds to get featured articles and photo of the day on your phone's home screen.
  • Wiki TV is a release of the above optimized for Google TV.