Friday, August 26, 2011

Wikimedia Chapters Planet

So I have created my first real website, Wikimedia Chapters Planet, a blog aggregator that collects blog posts and reports from the Wikimedia Chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Setting it up was surprisingly easy thanks to the free Planet software (only a small hack was needed to get it to run). The question on how to update it was a bit of a dilemma as it is not trivial to run the Python Planet scripts on the free hosting I had (and I didn't want to spend too much on updated hosting), but I solved it by simply running all the scripts on my PC and having a .bat file do the uploading every hour or so.
The translation part, which is crucial in making the site useful, was sheer luck, as although Google closed its Translation API, it is still available as a free gadget for websites, and it can handle multiple languages in the same page (something, Google Chrome's built in  service can't).

All that was left is to gather the blogs and flip the switch. Currently, I collect blog posts from 19 and reports from eight  chapters(out of 35) plus the Wikimedia Foundation. Hopefully, more chapters will join the list and we can all see the many things that are happening around the world.