UnifiedRecentChanges

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

The current means to implement this is by aggregating ModWiki implementations. Examples of this in action are

This openwiki one was broken by spam but I cannot manage to fix it. Anyone here know the syntax?--AndrewCates

: Andrew, I'm trying to fix it at the moment, but I cannot save the page WikiSites? for some reason beyond adding the Meatball feed. It won't let me save any syndicated feeds that it isn't already synidcating. This is a better example text that should be saved, plus of course other feeds once you locate them.

 Sunir, thanks a million. I got the below to save on a new pages and put it into the aggregator as an argument. At least the sites you have listed are there now --AndrewCates

<Syndicate("http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/action=rss&days=3",240)>
<Syndicate("https://www.usemod.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?action=rss&days=3",240)>
<Syndicate("http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de:8000/RecentChanges?action=rss_rc",240)>

: -- SunirShah

Also the dairiki one isn't in action its a fixed download from April. --ac

See also ChangeAggregator.

In the early days, it looked as if InterWiki technology would allow to link many wikis into a real wiki web. Experience has shown, however, that RecentChanges is a powerful force, driving the community. All important OnlineCommunity members seem to be RecentChangesJunkies. Therefore, unified recent changes is important -- we need a place where we can see what is going on, to pull us back, to keep us attached to the communities.

Using UseMod:WikiPatches/RssInclusion and one of the RichSiteSummary producing patches for UseMod, it is trivial to add all the RSS feeds onto one page -- et voilà! -- unified recent changes! The default RssInclusion does not take advantage of all the wiki tags available in ModWiki, but such a thing would also be trivial to write.

OddMuse also allows you to merge multiple RSS feeds into one. You can, for example, produce unified recent changes from MeatballWiki and UseModWiki: [1]

Instead of providing unified recent changes, RSS feeds can be used by other technology, such as the MozillaSidebar, a series of SlashBox?es on your own portal site, MeerKat and UserLand which both feature aggregators, combining the most recent additions from a large number of sites, listing them by most-recent addition. Also, some people have resorted to external monitoring tools such as the WebSecretary that mails you changes to websites, rather than collecting them on yet another web page.

DaveJacoby runs a portal that does unified recent changes. His solution parses UseMod-style RecentChanges pages; it does not parse RSS feeds. The generated stuff is at http://csociety.org/~jacoby/XML/, and the munged output from RSS is at http://csociety.org/~jacoby/Portal/Includes/ and http://csociety.org/~jacoby/Portal/WML/ if you want to use it with your phone. At the time, ModWiki did not yet exist.

http://openwiki.com/?AllTheNews/Aggregation allows you to create not only a unified recent changes, but any number of unified RSS feeds yourself. Compare this to DaveJacoby's [News Collection] or DaveWiner's [Aggregator]. Dave's solution now includes adding Moz sidebars and 'annoying javascript popups'. However, the authors of openwiki.com are the ones who get credit for handling the complexity and presenting it to you with a simple interface. It does look pretty, but "I'm not one for Aggregators in that sense," says Dave.

(saved from a temporary page; in reply to an idea about a form of FilteredRecentChanged?):

Recently I've been thinking of something similar for a UnifiedRecentChanges engine. Everybody gets their own login, the purpose of which is to store on the server the list of wikis you are interested in, plus the list of pages you aren't interested in. It then pulls everything together via RSS (including synthesizing the RSS for sites that don't have it). The RC listing itself can even have a "hide" link to allow you to suppress any page in the list that you don't care about. -- anon.

WikiGateway could serve as a backend for UnifiedRecentChanges features; you could ask WikiGateway to collect RecentChanges from a target wiki, and WikiGateway will have subroutines that screen scraped or used RSS, as appropriate for the target wiki's particular WikiEngine. So far it has screen scraping subroutines for UseMod and ModWiki support for UseMod; soon MoinMoin will be added, and contributed subroutines for other [[WikiEngine]]s are being sought.

-- BayleShanks

: Another surprisingly simple approach, to get the RecentChanges of new wiki contributions, is by means of annotations. Let a person give several annotations on wikipages pref_1:page_1, pref_2:page_2,..,pref_n:page_n, with pref_1,..,pref_n being the WikiPrefix'es routing to (different) wikis and the annotations being guided by an WikiAnnotationMediator, that has its own RecentChanges. Currently [diigo] is open to extend its annotation service into this new dimension. I remember that KaPingYee with his CritLinkMediator allowed arbitrary Webpages to be annotations to arbitrary other pages and it had RecentChanges. -- FridemarPache

To connect the RecentChanges of several wikis, the author is going to start a RecentChangesWikiTrail, together with a (probably interactive) Screencast video, that illustrates the handling of the involved TrailFire annotation system. He invites other Trailfire users to expand this trail to their additional wikis of interest. -- FridemarPache

CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryInterCommunity CategoryUncommonWikiTechnology CategoryRecentChanges

UnifiedRecentChanges

Discussion