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: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam.
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Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
Flickr2Piwigo 2.0.0
Fremantle
· versioning · Piwigo ·
I updated Flickr2Piwigo today, or a few times in the last 24 hours actually, and dropped support for older versions of PHP. I usually bump the major version when a platform version is dropped, because it requires the person using the package to do something. Doing that seems to be a slightly contentious issue though.
Revisiting Piwigo
Fremantle
· Piwigo ·
I seem to have started this hot Sunday with a bit of a revisit to Piwigo,
releasing a new version of the Flickr2Piwigo plugin.
Or rather, two new versions, because in the first one, 1.5.7,
I forgot that the vendor/ directory had to be included and so the GitHub integration of the release system couldn't be used.
So I promptly released 1.5.8 with vendor/
and with an actually updated version number in the code.
Clumsy, but it's been ages since I did a release there!
MediaWiki for everything
Perth
· MediaWiki · Wikimedia · Markdown · websites ·
People say we shouldn't try to smush every feature possible into MediaWiki. That when we get to the point of integrating an email client (or some chat system, I guess, to modernise the cliche) then we'll have Gone Too Far. Not to mention that perhaps some people don't see a future for MediaWiki outside the Wikimedia movement (which I don't agree with at all).
But I don't know. I do still think that there's great power in the everything's-a-page model. It's what all the cool kids do with Obsidian or static Markdown-derived websites, and a wiki is just like that but packed up and run in one place—and old and uncool.
So I'll persist, I think, in adding things I want to MediaWiki. Maybe not a mail client, but definitely something to do with indieweb tools, possibly webmentions. But maybe a mail client.
RSS is never dead
Fremantle
· RSS ·
Why RSS matters by Ben Werdmuller, 9 December 2025:
The important thing about the open social web is not which protocol “wins.” It’s whether we build an ecosystem where publishers keep control of their distribution and readers keep control of their attention. RSS remains one of the strongest tools we have to make that possible.
RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas.
Norwegian spigot
Avoiding things
Fremantle
· The Guardian · socialising · Christmas ·
It's an old article, but for some reason my bespoke backlog randomisation algorithm brought it back to me this morning. The algorithm knows nothing of content, so the timing is just luck.
How to party if you’re shy, socially awkward – or just plain boring, by Joel Golby, Lucy Mangan and Rhik Samadder, 17 December 2022:
Imagine, if you will, wanting to go to a party. Imagine knowing that you will have a good time – that the mere experience of being around people fills you, as a matter of course, with joy and contentment. That you go home with a spring in your step, a song in your heart, a smile on your lips – refreshed, restored, rejuvenated and ready for the next one.
That is what life is like for most of the population. And then there’s us. The introverts. The people who do not need people. The people for whom people, en masse, are the worst thing imaginable. A stranger is not “just a friend you haven’t met yet”. This is a sentence that makes no sense to us. A stranger is just a person keeping us in a room, a situation we don’t want to be in, probably with music playing and definitely away from our books and our own lavatory.
IA overloaded
Fremantle
· Internet Archive · websites ·
The Internet Archive is returning 502 at the moment, so my evening has slowed down for now. I think I'll retire to the Comfy Chair with a book.
I hope the stupid slop bots aren't bothering the IA again.
Bohemia Outdoor Cinema
Fremantle
· Fremantle · cinemas ·
The thing about taking photos of plaques is that they often contain info that you don't read properly until later when processing the pics. Like the other day when I noticed that the old FTI screen had a plaque, but I assumed that the cinema geeks (of which there seem to be quite a few) would've got a photo of the actual structure. They hadn't though.
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