Welcome

My coffee mug

Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.

I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.

I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.

Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.

I'm currently reading the following books: A Puritan Bohemia (Margaret Sherwood, 1896), and Arrowsmith (Anon), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson).

To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', or the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world. If you want to leave a comment on this site (by creating an account), you need to know the secret code Tuart (it's not very secret, but seems to be confusing enough for most spammers).

Below are my recent blog posts.



URL shorteners

Fremantle

Building a less terrible URL shortener by The Lego Mirror, 23 July 2024:

URL shorteners are generally a bad idea for a few main reasons:

  • They obfuscate the actual link destination, making it harder to figure out where a link will take you.
  • If they disappear or are shut down, the link is broken, even if the destination is fully functional.
  • They often collect extra tracking/analytics information.

Darker but not night

Fremantle

  • Walyalup civic centre all lit up

    Walyalup civic centre all lit up

  • The dismal remaining deposit slip desk of the old Bendigo Bank branch

    The dismal remaining deposit slip desk of the old Bendigo Bank branch

  • Johnson Court from the alley off Point Street

    Johnson Court from the alley off Point Street

Oval wandering

Fremantle

I took a bunch of photos of the oval, despite the sun not wanting to do the nice warm thing it was doing just before I got there. There's a whole area of natural limestone cliff at the back, mostly hidden by signs, as well as the seven huge Morton Bay figs, and there's the scoreboard, and the far corner where nothing much happens. I'd wondered if the Knowle was visible from there but of course there's that building in the way.

The light has gone away, which probably means it's time to go to the pub, before Victoria Hall.

Rainy Sunday

Fremantle

· Fremantle · power poles ·

It's rainy and windy and a bit cold, but I seem to be heading into Freo to go to the Freo Society meeting about the oval development.

The power poles looked nice against the grey sky, and I guess at some point the sight of aerial wires like these will be rare (although some of these are HV so they'll be around a bit longer I think, than the LV ones to houses).

Flattening papers

Fremantle

· archiving · family history · Cossack · ArchivesWiki · Wikimedia ·

This morning I've been working on another round of flattening HMW232, which is a box full of letters, receipts, telegrams, price lists, cheques, product samples, and other documents mostly dating from around the 1880s and '90s and accumulated by my great-great-grandfather Shakespeare Hall. He (and his brother at times?) ran a general store in Cossack (in Western Australia, not the historical Ukranian state), and much of these papers appear to be related to that. I'm not really sure, because at the moment I'm just focussing getting them cleaned, flattened, and stored before starting the scanning process.

My approach at the moment is to clean them of any loose dirt, unfold and flatten them, and add them to manila folders with one to three pages per folder. It seems to work best when there are fewer, so their folds don't interfere with each other. These manila folders are then stacked up in piles of about a dozen, between melamine chipboard boards, in a stack eight boards high. This seems to be about the sensible limit to weight, as well as my patience with this process. It means I do it for a few hours every few months.

After a few months, the papers are taken out, grouped by type, and stored permanently in those white archival folders (I guess we don't call them 'manila' because they're the wrong colour?) and kept in polyprop archive boxes. The scans go on Commons and the archival descriptions on ArchivesWiki.

IA Upload upgraded

Fremantle

· IA Upload · PHP · upgrades · Wikimedia ·

I shifted IA Upload on to a new server today, where it's running on Debian 12 and PHP 8.2. So that means it's time to upgrade the tool's PHP dependencies, and as it's a Slimapp app, it seems that the first step is to get simplei18n working with a more modern version of Twig. So it's not going to get done today, it seems…

Redesigned Wikimedia wishlist is open

Fremantle

· Wikimedia · Community Tech · work ·

The new system for the Community Wishlist was launched yesterday. It replaces the old annual system of having a set period each year when people can propose wishes, with some weeks following of voting etc. In the new system, wishes get submitted whenever, and are gathered together into focus areas and those are what will be voted on (again at any time).

I think it's an improvement. The software for running it certainly is! We've built a data entry form, which reads and writes a wikitext table. There are also other parts that read all the wish templates into a (Toolforge) database and then write out various tables (all wishes, recent ones, etc.) into wiki pages.

There's more info about the launch in a Diff post: Share your product needs with the Community Wishlist

What is App

Riverton

· chat · social media · websites ·

So much happens on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord (and other chat platforms), that I'm starting to feel like just giving up on fighting them, and even promoting the idea of ephemeral chat being the place to do everything. Mailing lists are silent, and forums work but only for fairly specific communities. Almost everyone seems to be completely happy with reams of discussion and history being locked up in proprietary websites, so why shouldn't I be too?

I don't like the fact that history is forgotten, that search is rubbish, that threads don't have subjects and can't be continued ad-hoc days or weeks or months later. That attached photos are down-scaled and have their metadata striped. And a dozen other features of these systems.

But I do like the fact that it's possible to talk to people! And that's really what it's all about. So my new approach, I think, is to focus on the ephemerality of chat — it's just like talking to pepole, there's no need or desire to record everything, and anything that's worth recording needs to be transferred to some other place. That last bit is a steep rule for most chat systems, especially those like Slack that try to make you believe that they're the long-term record of your community. But I think it works, especially if some people make it their business to copy relevant stuff to a wiki or other easily-updatable website.

So I'll give up on the mailing lists, and stop feeling worried about the personal and organisational history that's daily being put on the front of a conveyor belt to deletion. I'll not go as far as to join Facebook, but I'll stick with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, and IRC groups that I'm part of, and try to free up that part of my brain that gets annoyed about all this stuff.

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