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+dayOfYearordate*10000+month*100+dayOfMonthvalue 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)
- Ah, yes, sorry, I did put this in the wrong place! Thanks for fixing that! ^_^; Now regarding the technical issues: the first item is just lots of busy work. A single long switch statement should suffice. The second would just involve some math. It's just a matter of figuring out the math correctly. Since I proposed it I wanna work on it later :). --Stux 23:22, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
