[Techtalk] Creating feeds - how to update?

Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher at gmail.com
Tue Aug 19 03:10:34 UTC 2008


Hi chix & friends,

I want to create a RSS/atom feed based on changing data from the
Wikipedia main page. MediaWiki has some support for feeds but I want
to tidy it up, remove duplicate info and generally make it look
prettier. Getting and processing the data is no problem, and I will
probably use <http://www.dalkescientific.com/Python/PyRSS2Gen.html> to
generate my feed, but I'm not exactly sure how to update it.

I will have a cron job that runs a Python script each hour that checks
if the data has been updated. But if it has, how do I modify the feed
file?

Do I just overwrite the old feed file completely? Insert the new feed
items into the file? How long should old items stay in the feed? The
file would get too long if everything stayed in there forever...

thanks,
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/


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