Blog/VagueIdeasAboutBlogging

So I've been using MediaWiki at home for quite a while now, and I like it very much.

I want to use it for my public website too, and I want to be blogging. The blogging extensions don't quite fit my use case (I'm the only user of this wiki), but the category system is quite flexible and APIs are available too, so I can cook something up.

In this post i want to outline some basic ideas on how I plan to be blogging using MediaWiki.

Discarded options

So for a while I planned and planned and planned on how I would be doing this, and of course i ended up in analysis paralysis.

I'm fairly good at managing MediaWiki and its internals but i'm not a real "pro" at this (yet?).

Long story short, i won't be using Namespaces for the blog versus other content. I'll be doing most of my things with Category

General plan

I'll add all posts in the blog to the Category:Blog page, and that's mostly it, editing wise. I might also add a category for the year and for the month, but i'm not sure.

For the presentation (reading experience) what I want to end up with is a simple page listing all of my posts in chronological order, from most recent (top of the page) to less recent (bottom of the page) ideally grouping them by year and by month within a year.

For the first part (list of posts) the Intersection extension works quite well, for the second part (group by year/month)... Not quite.

I'm playing with the APIs and I think i'll probably run a cronjob or something to regenerate the list and update an index page.

I'm playing with pywikibot and pwiki ... So far I'm liking pwiki better, for my goal it's simpler and the quickstart is really quicker. Pywikibot on the other hand looks more headed towards running stuff on the public wikis run by the Mediawiki foundation/

End notes

In general I just miss writing, and I want to get back at it.

Updates

I coded a quick Python script to generate the blog index, all blog posts will now be visible at Blog/Index :)

It'd be nice to include an excerpt of the page... maybe in the future :)