wikipedia page, how to display current date in yyyymmdd? - mediawiki

I want to display current date in yyyymmdd format in our company's internal wiki page. I have looked through mediawiki page for guidance, but it seems like that I need to link to some libraries or template. In general, it's a little difficult to navigate on mediawiki's page and learn necessary "programming language". Please advise.

{{CURRENTYEAR}}{{CURRENTMONTH}}{{CURRENTDAY2}}
Due to MediaWiki and browser caching, these variables frequently show when the page was cached rather than the current time.
Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words

Related

How to display Wikipedia pages in my website?

I am building my own version of thewikigame.com. It is based on the concept of Wikiracing. On the website, the developer embeds the Wikipedia pages into his own website, and tracks how many clicks the user makes to reach the target page. I am not sure how he did this. What would be the best way possible to get the HTML + styling to display these pages on my own website?
As I understand from your question, you need first to download the whole content of enwiki to your website. And to do this you have to download the dump XML for English Wikipedia from this mirror, then import that XML to your wiki using one of these methods.

View how HTML appeared in the past?

Is there a tool or service I can use to identify how a website looked liked a year ago if they have access to the website's html code? For instance, say I save how nba.com's html code today, can I see how this html code visually appeared today, in a year's time?
I'm asking because instead of scraping websites daily to obtain info and manually checking if the info is in the same position, what's stopping me from scraping a website's html code and retroactively looking back at the script and accessing the information I need?
This site has a history of what web pages looked like in olden times...
https://archive.org/web/
And they do provide an API:
https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php

Find links to nonexistent pages in MediaWiki

I have been searching for a few days and it is hard to find specifics for wikimedia.
Does anyone know of an extension, or report that will show internal links to nonexistent pages?
We host a wiki where we have users that have crated some excellent content, but to have to go through each page to find the links to pages that have not been created yet is next to impossible due to the amount of content.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated...
Go to your Special:SpecialPages list and you will find
Wanted categories
Wanted files
Wanted pages
Wanted templates
which are (more or less) dynamic lists of all redlinks in your wiki.
If you want to only see a list of dead links for a specific page or a group of pages, you can use DynamicPageList to run a linksfrom query with openreferences = yes. Go here for more info: http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=DPL:Manual_-_DPL_parameters:_Criteria_for_page_selection#linksfrom

Distingushing features of a blog, i.e deference between a blog and a normal site

I'm looking at things that can distinguish a blog from a normal website. These are things that a program needs to be able identify from the html of a website or particular features that a site supports. For eg. pings. The same for news websites.
I'm working on a blog/news monitor program and it will index sites to automatically determine if it is a blog or a news site and then monitor user feedback in comments etc on posts from sites that it determines to be of a blog or news nature.
So what i'm really after is suggestions on what i can use or look out for in identifying these sites.
It's going to be a desktop app written in java so if you have any code specifics in java that'll be great.
thanks in advance
You can search the page for the word "blog", as this will probably be present. Specifically, you can look for it in parts of the HTML page, or exclude parts - like links. This will give you a decent starting point.
Ultimately, though, this is something that will have to be done manually. You should construct an interface for people to specify if it's a blog or news site, or different features of it, when the site is submitted. Then you should create a database of sites and features, and flag them so that you or another administrator can review them and make changes. Once you do this for a site, you'll never need to do it again, so for example http://*.wordpress.com/ is all going to be blogs.
Some features you can automatically detect or get a pretty good chance of detecting, but ultimately you will need a manual review.
Look for a discoverable RSS or Atom feed, which should be present on a blog or serially-updated news site.

Generating a static website from a set of content data (possibly with webgen, webby or a similar toolkit)

My company (an engineering firm) is looking to redesign their website with some dynamic content. We have a nice portfolio of projects that we'd like to present on our site by category.
To elaborate, I'd like to have a "Projects Category" menu, where you can choose a sub-project category (such as churches, schools, etc) which links to a page with images of all projects which have been tagged with that category attribute. Clicking on an image would then take you to a detailed page for that project.
I have done a good bit of asp and jsp page development, but I've always worked on the front end in an enterprise environment - I've never built a production site from the back end. The advice I've gotten so far is that a full-blown CMS solution would be somewhat overkill, as we won't have a large hit count, and we'll be displaying a few hundred projects at most.
One big-picture choice I appear to have - whether to dynamically generate the pages (with asp or jsp) or to use a tool to generate a set of static html pages. The tool would build the menus, project summary pages, and individual project pages based on a set of data I could provide (in the form of a database or text file.)
I'm leaning towards trying to use a tool like webgen or webby to statically generate the site due to our current web hosting situation. Any thoughts on which approach is more appropriate? Is webgen or webby capable of doing what I am trying to do? Or can anyone recommend other web authoring tools better equipped to accomplish this?
Thanks for any feedback!
You could always use Template Toolkit :)
Jekyll may be worth a look.
Refer: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/wiki/
I've been told that webgen can't do what I'm trying to do (without some manual coding extensions myself) but that nanoc can.
http://nanoc.stoneship.org/