Dirty wiki scraping

SI28 published outcomes

• series of radio shows
• event
• website
• PDF aka zine(s)?

Timeline

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)

Dirty wiki scraping

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

Pieces

• cover
• introduction
• colophon
• content (departing from what is already there)
  • [[1]]
  • Writing_Machines_Notebook
    • (includes links to Blog, Reflections and Piece of Writings)
    • User:LEa/blog/2025-10-13
    • User:LEa/blog/2025-10-30
    • User:LEa/blog/2025-11-19
    • User:Youjung/SI28:_On_Writing_Machines
    • User:Youjung/Workshop_at_Brussels
    • User:Barbs/SI28
  • Writing Machine Directory
    • Writing Machines presented by Steve Rushton
    • Writing Machines from class: 25-09-15
    • Babblebash
    • Mud-cell Poem
    • State Machines from class: 25-09-23
    • Glyphica Text Machine
    • Protocols from class: 25-09-29
    • The Beatles Session
    • Psychogeographic Walking Machine
    • The Dragon of Arnhem
    • A Deathcore Writing Machine
  • SI28-Radio-Worm
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week1
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week2
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week3
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week4
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week5
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week6
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week7
    • SI28-Radio-Worm/Week8
  • Event documentation

Let the scraping begin

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

so, for example: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Writing_Machines_Notebook?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.

PDF making

• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Weasyprint
• https://weasyprint.org/
• https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/

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

Install weasyprint: https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/first_steps.html#installation

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.

Help/Support/Links

For CSS Print specific examples:

• CSS Print
• CSS Print examples

For CSS documentation:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

For Weasyprint specific features support:

• https://doc.courtbouillon.org/weasyprint/stable/api_reference.html#supported-features

(extra) HTML making

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.