Archive for the ‘Wellynews’ Category

Wellynews tips – custom RSS feeds

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A number of people take the main wellynews RSS feed at http://wellington.gen.nz/rss. However, this is just one of many feeds which the system automatically creates.

Tag feeds

All tags have there own RSS feed. You just need to substitute the tagname into the url:

ie. http://wellington.gen.nz/transport/rss

This feed contains news items tagged as transport, or any of the transport sub tags (such as airport and parking). It also includes all news items published by organisations tagged with transport (ie. Snapper card).

A full list of available tags is shown here.

Combinations

If you want an RSS feed about, say, zombie outbreaks but only on the waterfront then you can use a combination feed.

ie. http://wellington.gen.nz/zombies+waterfront/rss

Note two tag names separated by a plus sign in the url. Interestingly enough, zombies and waterfront is really a valid combination and will return content.

Publisher combinations

If you’re looking for what a given publisher has said about a given tag, you can extract that using a publisher combination.

For example, mentions of Newtown made by Wellington City Council.

ie. http://wellington.gen.nz/wellington-city-council+newtown/rss

A list of available publishers is shown here.

This url scheme is inspired by the excellent implementation on the Guardian newspaper’s site.

Posted in Development, Wellynews | 180 Comments »

WCN hosted content

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Wellington Community Net (WCN) is a free web hosting service for Wellington community groups. WCN has been funded by the City Council for a number of years now, but that funding is now under review.

WCN hosts 600 odd community groups, meaning that alot of the content that Search Wellington indexes is probably hosted on WCN. I wanted to find out how much.

All WCN sites are physically hosted on the same machine. Taking a dump of all valid websites from Search Wellington, and filtering out the who’s DNS resolves to the WCN server, should identify WCN hosted sites.

The Search Wellington API can then be used to tag each of these sites with a hidden ‘wcnhosted’ tag. The following Perl script checks the DNS for the uses an API call to apply a tag to wcn hosted sites.

All of the news items and feeds published by these sites are automatically pulled into this tag, giving:

http://wellington.gen.nz/wcnhosted

Which shows that approximately 340 of 9000 odd indexed, news items originated from WCN.

This is a low measurement, as Search Wellington chooses not to list all groups on WCN and only includes news items with a permanent url, but I think shows that the loss of WCN would leave quite a significant hole in the local webspace.

Posted in Development, Perl, Wellynews | No Comments »