Subscribe

Syndicate

I think MediaWiki's default syndication feed support is pretty suboptimal for normal viewing. It's just hard-to-read raw diffs of the page changes, it ignores all formating and just gives you wikitext, and it has tons of crap in it you don't care about if you just want to read the site. It just isn't what you want for reading.[1]

So, I installed Gregory Szorc's nice WikiFeeds extension and made some changes to it myself. It provides much better and more pleasant syndication, and it reads like a blog feed, basically, which is nice.

One thing that is different about my site when compared to a blog is that I'm not only adding new articles, but I'm also updating old articles with information, so a simple feed of the newest pages is not the most useful view of the changes. So, I recommend subscribing to the recent changes feed, which will include major page creations and edits:

You can see how to construct other specialized feeds on the WikiFeeds page. For example, you might want a feed just for the Opinions category (rss atom), or you could be a masochist and you really want a feed for every minor change I make (rss atom).

Twitter

Sigh, I finally gave in and started using my Twitter account. I'll announce new articles there as well.

Subscribe

Since I don't like feeds much myself, I've set up a mailing list that I send out notification of substantial changes and new articles, and maybe the full article text, when I write them. Personally, I like getting a mail reminder so I don't have to check the site or a feed reader. I will make a judgement call to determine when I think something is important enough to send out to the list.

Watch for Changes

And finally, you can just manually watch the Recent Changes page or the Homepage, both of which have a nice list of timestamped changes, if you don't dig on the syndication or mailing list thing.

  1. If you really want to try the raw MediaWiki feeds, here you go: rss atom
This page was last edited on 23 March 2010, at 04:18.