OS X Code (r,s)

Posted on Sunday 16 October 2005 - Popularity: 5%

I’m currently working on a WordPress plugin with the name “wikicache”. Here’s a first preview.

So what is it? It’s a plugin to cache Wikipedia articles you’ve worked on (but not limited to that) and to make them available directly on your blog. I’m nearly finished with the part visitors of your blog will see, just need to add some CSS for the images; they are currently a bit weird positioned without any additional CSS. The admin part is not that far off as well, so a beta release should be relatively close. Some of the features:

• Not only the HTML content is cached, the images are cached as well, so you don’t steal any bandwidth by hotlinking the images on your blog, you just access Wikipedia once in a while when you re-cache the articles
• Only the content inside a pre-defined div is cached and other specific divs are removed. The original header, scripts, the edit buttons … all that is automatically removed, only the content and a link to the original article gets cached
• If a link is found that points to an other article that is already cached; the link will be changed to that local article, so visitors will stay on your site as long as they click on links that you’ve already cached. Additionally such a link gets a different css class than links that point to external sites, so you can customize the look of them and they are not opened in a blank window
• Articles are tagged, so you can easily get a list of other articles with the same tag
• All the articles are available in a list that can be ordered by tag, date, name, popularity
• There’s a pretty sweet search function that even works inside a tag list and you can use “and” or “or” logic. However, the search doesn’t search through the cached files, just the article descriptions
• Currently the plugin only works with Wikipedia, but at release it will be possible to easily add definition files for more sites, even non-wikis. These definition files contain all the instructions how a site has to be parsed, what divs have to be removed and other information like that. You will be able to create them on your own or you can download them over here

Ok, so much for now. More as soon as I’m ready.

Fredi