Dirty wiki scraping: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:25, 25 November 2025

The production timeline is super short, so let's keep it doable!


TUE 25 Nov	wiki printing intro (morning) + decisions making (afternoon)
WED 26 Nov	editorial work (afternoon)
MON 1 Dec	work time (morning)
TUE 2 Dec	prototyping support (until 15:00)
WED 3 Dec	editing day with Steve (all day)
WED 10 Dec	release party in the studio (time tbc)

The proposal from our side (sparked in conversation with Marloes): dirty wiki scraping

embracing "dirty wiki scraping" as a method

working from the middle of what is there already

an exercise in publishing material that is work-in-progress

Pick one of the links above (or any other wiki page that you would like to include in this publication)!

There is a nice trick to render a wiki page as a HTML page from the wiki directly, by adding to your URL:

?action=render

Save this page as a local file, with:

CTRL+S

This saves the HTML files + a folder with all the images to your computer (following a local first attitude).

Open this HTML file in your code editor, open it in your browser, and look at the structure of the HTML.

For the making of a PDF from a wiki page, we will use weasyprint.

First, move to the folder where you saved your wiki page on your computer with cd:

cd /move/to/the/folder/

Then, create a CSS stylesheet with the same name as your wiki page, for example:

nano Writing_Machines_Notebook.html

add one CSS rule to start with:

body{
  color: magenta;
}

Then, run weasyprint to turn the HTML into a PDF using the CSS stylesheet:

weasyprint Writing_Machines_Notebook.html -s Writing_Machines_Notebook.css Writing_Machines_Notebook.pdf

Open the PDF...

You should have a PDF now with magenta colored text!!

From here you can continue to style your PDF.

For CSS Print specific examples:

For CSS documentation:

For Weasyprint specific features support:

To use this wiki page as a mini website, you probably want to add style this page.

To do this you would need to insert a stylesheet to the page.

If you do this programmatically, it means that you can still update the content of the wiki page at any time!

You can do this for example with beautifulsoup: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

We can write one python script that everyone can use to do this.

@@ Line 43: / Line 43: @@
 * colophon
 * content (departing from what is already there)
+** https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/SI28-Glossary
 ** [[Writing_Machines_Notebook]]
 *** (includes links to Blog, Reflections and Piece of Writings)