Template talk:dailyarticle

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Some suggestions

Moved from Template talk:didyouknow

Hi Gfd,
Thanks for making this template and adding documentation! Now that I understand its purpose better I'd like to suggest a couple of things:

• Right now, the template maps the day of the year to a subset of the available FA articles. I think we can improve this by having a separate mapping template that enumerates all FAs (weekly and daily) and assigns each a number from 1-400 (or however many there are) and provides the FA article based on that input number. Ideally it should also be able to find the article by year/year-offset but I'm not sure yet what the application for that would be.
• The FAs are currently on a repeated rotation so every day of the year would give the same FA. We could help 'randomize' this by using a Linear_congruential_generator formula as a simple but predictable PRNG. We can then feed the formula the current date*1000+dayOfYear or date*10000+month*100+dayOfMonth value so that we end up with a predictable pattern that won't repeat for many years! Oh, I guess we'd have to normalize the input and output so that all 400 entries have the roughly equal probability of appearing. But these things can be solved I think!

Anyway, that's my two cents on my two ideas. This can be worked on once the fate of the main page redesign is decided. Thanks for your hard work! --Stux 14:40, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not an expert at wiki coding, so I don't entirely understand how these suggestions would work, but they definitely sound like an improvement! We just need to get someone less clueless than myself to do the work. Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 21:30, 4 December 2020 (UTC)