I just did a cool little hack. I use Mediawiki to maintain all sorts of stuff that no one cares about but we can't lose it anyway. Now the thing is that we have a shitload of sites and domains, some of which were cancelled, expired or stolen (yeah). These are still floating around the master DNS zone, confusing the hell out of everyone and constantly leaking into people's schedules so I get conversations like this:
"Hey, how come there is no website at sexwithgoats.za?"
"Well, we cancelled it 3 years ago"
So I wrote a small script to lint the master zone, which works nicely and spots various ugly warts that the systems guy can fix later on. The only problem is the cancelled domains. So I went over to the wiki and made a page that lists all known domains we ever used.
Then a penny dropped and I had an idea:
[image of a lamp hovering over a person's head is censored because of self-righteous pro-copyright assholes]
I just wrote a small function that reads the wiki page from the wiki directly, cleans HTML off and produces a naked shiny list of cancelled domains in an array!
People are writing tons of bullshit about SOAP, XMLRPC, CORBA, REST and the rest of opinionated crap. If I told them I had to retrieve a list of domains off a central location they'd tell me to write a Java application server and a web service layer on top of it. Well fuck you.
