You may have noticed I’m posting a lot more lately. It’s partly because I’m not working, plus a bit of conscious effort… plus a couple effort-saving shortcuts I’ve set up.
In the past, I used to share images to Instagram and then had an IFTTT applet run to post those images to WordPress as blog posts. I wanted to flip that model and instead first post to my own site, and THEN have the option of sharing to Instagram or other social networks. The solution I’ve landed on is to use an iOS Shortcut as a Share Sheet action. That means I take a photo, click the Share button, and then click the Post with Pic shortcut.
It's a small thing perhaps, but I do think that making it quick to create a post is an important part of any blogging set-up — and can help with the feeling that blogging is "too hard" or that it's just quicker to use social media. (There was another post I saw recently about why it's good to host your own stuff, but weirdly I can't find it again now.)
I've noticed, thanks to Waymarked Trails, three new walking trails around Fishing Boat Harbour (new to OSM, that is). My first thought was that these are joining up the Americas Cup plaques that are spotted around the place, but I'm not really sure.
So I went for a walk, and found nineteen pink crayfish trail markers.
First up, I stopped at Bill Campbell's bookshop, and bought a copy of A Place of Consequence. He was telling me about when they replaced the floor in that building, twenty years ago, and the fact that there's no cellar there.
My search for the walking trail started at the shipwrecks galleries, where I found a Maritime Heritage Marker:
But then, not far away was the first pink crayfish (or orange lobster, I guess, if we're to follow the tourism guidelines).
After that I had to walk down towards Bathers Beach, but there were no markers to be found at all, and no indication of where to walk. I had to carry on, and around in front of the Fisherman's Coop and over the road before I found a second marker. Then it started to seem that this trail might actually exist (and that I was even following it in the right direction, if the direction of the pink antennae was anything to go by).
The third plaque was in much better condition, because it's mounted vertically on some wooden steps. It pointed to the right along the boardwalk, but the map said that there was meant to be a loop up around Bon Scott's statue. There was no sign of that though. This was the first plaque with a visible QR code, but it resolved to http://11631286 which didn't seem quite right.
After the boardwalk, Little Creatures had a bunch of closely-spaced ones, and then on the other side of the road was the actual main sign board that explained the whole thing.
After that sign things were easy, although oddly one of the markers further along is marked "start/finish" and points across the road. There doesn't seem to be any on the other side of the road, so I guess it was just put in the wrong place. The last marker I could find was back where I started at the maritime museum (I walked past it to start with.
So all up, I think it's definitely a trail, although some fixes are needed in the OSM relation. The map says 12 minutes, but I took 45 (being a dawldling nerd with a camera).
I seem to be giving up (for now) on the idea of a database of photos that I've taken. A while ago it occurred to me that it's silly to keep all photos together just by virtue of the fact that I was the one to click them. Far more useful to sort and store them by usage and proximity to other data.
So I'm experimenting with a document-centric approach, where a wiki page serves as what in other systems might be a tag or album or category. Photos (and other files) can be embedded into that page, and gain their metadata from the page and their place within it. It's looser approach, more like a scrapbook or commonplace book, and I will probably also add at least some per-file metadata (e.g. time and coordinates) at some point. Most of what I want in a record-per-photo system I seem to now be getting from a combination of a calendar view and some manually created lines on a map.
This evening we pulled all of the non-cupboard stuff out of the archive room at the Buffalo Club, and somewhat sorted it. At least, it's organised by size and fragility, and is ready for the next step. It's nice to get a bit of a handle on what's there and what needs to be done.
I'm taking an old frame home to refurbish and see if it can have new glass. Looks pretty solid, in the timber.
I thought today would be a nice day to work from the café courtyard at the Arts Centre. It's cool and shady and the coffee's… well, the coffee's fine, at least (it's not great). But the mosquitoes, they are not fine. They are eating every bit of me, buzzing in my ears, and trying to drown themselves in the coffee. Maybe if they could all drown themselves, that'd be okay. But yeah, shady places with good sprinklers on lawns do perhaps have their downsides.
So TCPKeepAlive enables keepalives handled by the TCP stack implementation (Linux in my case), whereas ServerAliveInterval enables protocol level keep-alives (handled by OpenSSH).
This explains the behavior we’re observing, but also raises new questions:
Can I fix my problem by enabling the ssh protocol-level-keepalives? (ServerAliveInterval)
Why are the TCP keepalives only sent after 2 hours?
Why is my ISP dropping my TCP keepalive packages?
I verified that by setting ServerAliveInterval to 300 (5 min), my problems disappeared. We could stop now that I found a workaround, but let’s keep digging.
I documented my findings, and sent an email to my ISP. I quickly got a response back acknowledging that this is a bug on their side, and thanking me for my research. They still haven’t fixed the problem though.
I am experiencing similar things with my current (new) ISP, SpinTel. Haven't yet had any luck in solving it though. Borg keeps failing after ten minutes or so, and other ssh connections are (almost! but not quite) always failing after some amount of idle time. I've tried setting ServerAliveInterval 10 and ServerAliveCountMax 30 as suggested, but it's no good.
This is an interesting video about the production of Naniwa whetstones in Japan. I can't actually remember what brand I have (the labels have worn off), but they're pretty similar I think. I have some natural stones too, but the artificial ones are good (as far as I can tell!) and are easily flattened with each other (I have two 800s and a 1200 and they're similar enough to work together, and then any one of them is used to do the 5000).
The process of mass producing Japanese abrasive stones. (13:24)
But with Instagram, she says, there’s “no easy alternative” – TikTok “has its own issues” and other platforms with similar reach just aren’t there.
“[For] people who live in the country or in remote areas or minority groups or [who have] small businesses, that is a really good way for them to communicate and reach other people,” she says.
“It’s just not possible to set up an alternative at this point in time. So, to put it bluntly, we’re in a bit of deep shit, to be honest.”
There are old-school photo-sharing platforms including Flickr, Tumblr and Hipstamatic but they don’t have the reach of Instagram.
While social media companies have based their business model on trying to keep users engaged to collect more data and use it to curate advertising, she says, places such as Australia could slow this extraction down with restrictions– such as those in Europe – on how much information they collect.
I guess I'm just not very social, because I don't really understand the whole idea of wanting 'reach'. I like putting stuff on the internet and keeping it organised, and over time it can be seen and used by whoever. I view it a bit like putting a book in a library — I don't feel like it's failed if it's not been borrowed seven hundred times in the first month.
But yeah, I'm not social. I'm not media either.
(PS: And as far as alternatives to Instagram go, I should probably mention Pixelfed! Not that I use it.)
There are a lot of harmful and toxic dynamics to social media that we don’t want to recreate in the indie web… but people do want connection online, and if it feels like there’s no way to connect with others via the indie web, they’ll simply continue to migrate from silo to silo. A little friction can be helpful as a protective measure against harassment and abuse, but right now I suspect there’s too much friction to encourage the types of connection we want more of.
Simple interactions are too hard
Problem statement: simple interactions that are easy on social media, such as likes or short comments like “nice!” or “lol,” are socially awkward / unsuited to use with webmentions
(again, silly) where that RNI is the 'record number' of the item. There is also a 'reference number' that is not present in the URL but which is the far more common ID for these photos because it's often present in the actual scan.
(Books on the other hand have a BRN, and URLs like
There doesn't seem to be any way to link to a record by the reference number, unfortunately. The advanced search doesn't have anything.
So it looks like we'll do best to record both the reference and record numbers, and hope that whatever new database system they're going to move to next will work with one of those.
At 0750, on the morning of 1st March, we landed at East Fremantle boat ramp, rather cold, tired and blistered, but on the whole it had been an interesting and not-too-unpleasant trip.
"Not-too-unpleasant" is about what I remember of sailing on the Swan river as a boy. Not quite enjoyable — although I don't know how much of that was due to the other sea scouts being just so much more capable and confident than me.
Last year, I spent a lot of time iterating on Publish, the publishing interface for my website. This interface is a static HTML page that generates a markdown file. This markdown file can then be published to my website. The Publish page is public, but you cannot publish a blog post unless you have access to my Git repository.
This paradigm works well with my static website. I have a user interface that lets me prepare a post for publishing, and a button I can click that takes me to GitHub where I can publish the page. Having posts in static files and version control is significant to me. Static files are easy for me to reason with. I can see my data without having to use a database.
With that said, I see opportunities to improve the Publish tool that can only be done with a dynamic page.
The main improvement I would like to make is to streamline image publishing.
I've mentioned it before, but the storage and display of images (and other files) are the main things that keep me from switching fully to a static site. I am slowly working on some ideas for making those better, but really I'm not sure it'll ever be fully solved. It's too annoying to have to manually create derivative versions of every file, and (unlike what is described in the above post) I'm not sure I want to add content images to a Git repository.
Being able to drag and drop photos onto a blog post while editing is convenient, but that's not necessarily the workflow I'm aiming for — I generally want to upload things to Commons if possible, and add as much metadata as I can. So there's a certain laboriousness to adding images anyway, and reducing the time at upload mightn't matter too much.
Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.
Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.
I've been working on cataloguing a bunch of (physical) archival records recently, working through various boxes without really knowing beforehand what is to come. 90% are public, but now and then there are documents that need to be kept private. That's fine, there is a private place to catalogue those — but the system being what it is, the public catalogue is online and the private one is not. Which makes for good security, but it's a split in identifiers and an open question about how to represent the gaps that appear in the public catalogue.
The current way to approach it looks like it'll be duplicating the private identifiers on the public catalogue but not putting in any info about them. Then, all their info gets added to the private catalogue (but vice versa is not done: there's no need to represent all public items in the private catalogue, I guess the idea being that anyone with access to that also has access to the public side).
The goal is that for each long-term storage box it's possible to get an ordered list of what's in it. That list will actually have to be multiple, but it seems like it's all going to work.
The other aspect that's come up is how to add in — sometimes much later on — things like missing pages of documents that have already been accessioned. So far, this has been done pretty sneakily, with them being catalogued (and their scans uploaded to) the older catalogue record, but then the wayward pages being stored in whatever box is currently being appended to. This is not great, as although the entire original document is recorded together (that's nice) it means that there's no record in the per-box list of the missing pages! Not nice.
The fix to that seems to be to create records for each of the separated parts of the document. Then they're just like separate items, albeit ones that have a very close relationship. That feels most solid and just means that each needs to point to the other (and that's something that happens with different items all the time anyway).
So, in summary:
The public catalogue gets 'shadow' items that point to the private catalogue.
Each storage box gets its (multiple) lists of contents.
Any parts of a document that are separate (either in the original order, or where they're now stored) result in multiple catalogue items.
I'm at Good Things café, which I will probably always think of as the Attic. Being here reminds me that there is much more work to be done in documenting Brian Klopper's work around Freo. I've probably posted this before, but there's no point in being a wiki nerd on the internet if you can't get trains into everything:
That's the floor that's below me, as I type this. Bricks supported on what must be quite a number of tonnes of steel.
Anyway, I wasn't planning on working on that bit of Freopedia today; I wanted to get down to the harbour and walk another of DoT's marked trails, the Challenger Cray Trail. What a pun that is, how clever of a government department to try their hand at some word play! No, I'm teasing them. But there is actually an interesting part to the trail, and that the fact that they send people down Molfetta Quays. I'd not thought that it was particularly encouraged for tourists to go there, but I shall take it as license to explore today I think.
After last week's wiki meetup in Ellenbrook I'm feeling rather disappointed in my phone's camera's ability in harsh summer sunlight, and am going to try to keep the aperture small and the ISO down today and probably end up with things that are too dark but which at least have nicer detail.
This morning's walk was a success I think, although I'm growing more disappointed in the Department of Transport's ability to a) put markers where they need to be, and b) use materials that don't degrade to nothing in the sun. Those things don't matter though, because this is really more about ambling around looking at things than it is a necessity to follow the actual trail. I found thirteen trail markers, but only twelve are on this map because two are in the same location.
This is the second of these that I've followed, after the Boardwalks and Brewery Loop a couple of weeks ago. This one goes out to the end of a couple of groynes and so is nicer I think. There's always something totally calming about sitting on the rocks at the water's edge, looking out to sea.
The main sign.
I started at the main sign, but actually it says that the start is in front of Kalis' fish and chip shop, so I headed over there — where there was the lovely sight of a pod of dolphins right in close in the harbour, herding a school of fish up against the wharf. They were being watched by a few excited tourists and some crew on the Marine Rescue boat Resolute. I tried to get a photo of them, but of course that sort of pic never works out (and one should not even try, and just enjoy the moment).
Most of the trail was as boring as expected:
But a few of things stood out:
Firstly this cor-ten obelisk thing.
"
And the seafood factory near it, with it's large flow of water.
The entrance to what was Quest Apartments, but which now has the sillily-punctuated name of "Be. Fremantle".
And the cruising yacht club's 'club house' (such as it is; more masts and less pomposity than the nearby Royal Perth Annex I think).
But most useful, and leading to hopefully another Sunday outing for me, is this map of the America's Cup Walk, which shows the locations of all (or some?) of the competitors in 1987:
I think Pix is my new favourite program. It seems to be a Mint fork of (or heir to?) the gThumb package. Pix seems to have everything I want at the moment, for simple and quick photo fixing.
It will a tough time for pedestrians and cyclists until the new traffic bridge is finished in just under 2 years time – but if you doubt it will be worthwhile, just have a look at the third picture below and couple that with the bridge shuddering every time a vehicle goes past!
And this last pic is just to prove that I was there on the last day.
I’ve been on a bit of a kick lately replacing MySQL (and equivalents) with Postgres. I harbour this dream of only maintaining a single database stack, silly as that sounds.
Normally I’m pretty conservative with what I run, jog, and sit on, but I cloned Clara’s and my other wiki and did a database migration to PostgreSQL over the long weekend, and it… worked? We run MediaWiki stock without extra plugins, but I’m still impressed how there’s been no appreciable difference in functionality or performance. I can now also use my little library of Postgres scripts for backups, and only have one DB on our jailed FreeBSD environment.
I've started the process of moving mwcli off GitHub. There are plenty of reasons for not liking GitHub, but really I'm just keen to keep wiki things together on Wikimedia's GitLab (and Phabricator for issue tracking). I figured it's better to move it before I keep working on improving the tool
I started surveying the America's Cup Walk plaques along Mews Road. There are fewer than I'd thought (ten so far), although I've not yet found a source that says how many there were originally (or when they were installed; I'm assuming it wasn't actually 1987, but maybe just a few years later?).
A big thing that keeps me from enjoying Flickr more is the inability to find duplicate files. The API doesn't support any sort of checksum, so for years people have tried to get around it by adding 'machine tags' of the form checksum:md5=1ed002a1483f4ae019470e3c3ffbfc7e. This sort of works, but there's no telling how long the tag search index takes to update — so if you upload a new file, it may or may not appear in search results for days, so any search for it will fail.
Today we added a map to to the Gawler history wiki, using Cargo. So far it's been a good way to find places that have been given quite incorrect coordinates (usually from dodgy address geocoding I think).
While I find computers effective for writing longer prose, hand writing in a notebook affords me more space to think and note. I can stop and notice things around me without wondering what else there is to check on my computer. I can sit still and look around without obligation to write or to write full prose. If I think of something, I can note it down; otherwise, I can, as I wrote in my notebook, let my mind wander.
I made the mistake yesterday of looking at how to determine a user's timezone in MediaWiki. I thought it'd be simple! Of course it's not. It does make sense, mostly, eventually. I'm giving up for now because I have other things to do and because I got to the point of reading the Wikipedia article about time zones and now I don't even know what one of these things is.
Some areas in a time zone may use a different offset for part of the year, typically one hour ahead during spring and summer, a practice known as daylight saving time (DST).
An "area in a time zone"?! That's a different time zone! That's what defines time zones, the fact that they have the same time. Or does it? Time zones all have nice unique names, like "Australia/Perth" where I am now (although note that they don't have nice standard or unique abbreviations — but at least the solid fact that 'EDT' doesn't refer reliably to either Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11) or Eastern Daylight Time (UTC−4) is actually a comforting piece of knowledge in this sea of confusion).
So they do have names, but what do those names mean? Are they time zones? Is "Australia/Melbourne" a time zone, or is it an umbrella term for AEST (UTC+10) and AEDT (UTC+11)? Are those the actual timezones? And for those, it's perfectly acceptable to define them as offsets (in minutes) from UTC.
And is it "time zone" or "timezone". Hurrumph.
(Which reminds me, I still need to switch my {{post}} template to accept time zone names rather than integer hour offsets, because those are the useful things, when combined with a date…)
So the scaffolding the went up last week seems to be so they can remove the eaves from the southern wall, perhaps in preparation for a new building on the boundary?
The Rogue Scholar science blog archive improves science blogs in important ways, including full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs and metadata, and communities.
I’ve deliberately left comments turned off for now, as Rodd is working on a project to turn this blog (and RoaldDahlFans) into a static site. This will make the site more secure; it’ll load faster for you; and it’ll be cheaper for me to run. The trade-off is that anything interactive – like comment forms – won’t work anymore. But I know what Emily means, and I miss having that form of interactivity here.
There is an interesting option that I’m toying with – using Bluesky and/or Mastodon for the comments. I’ve seen several static blogs doing this with those networks, and it feels like something I could do. I’ve started doing my research so it may well be appearing here before you know it…
This does sound like a good idea. It makes it possible for people to comment on a post, but not have to register a local account at all. (Like how it'd work if we all used webmentions?) A common approach seems to be to firstly publish the blog post (so that it has a URL), and then post about the post on Mastodon, and then either use the ID of that latter post or a search for the former post's URL (in one's own Mastodon posts) to find the Mastodon post. Once a relevant Mastodon post or posts has been found, retrieve any replies and show them on the blog post.
I might have to give it a go here (although where 'here' will be by the time you read this I don't know, but I think I want to nuke my site and do something different… not that I'm dissatisfied with MediaWiki as a blogging system…).
The other thing I want to use static-site comments for is on genealogy and archives' sites, where it'd be great to be able to get feedback on biographies or catalogue entries etc.
OOUI has a convention where parts of a class file are divided by comments such as /* Methods */ (e.g.). These are not method docblocks (they only have a single asterisk), and the phrases used are: Setup, Events, Static Properties (sometimes spelled with a lowercase 'P'), Static Methods, and Methods. I've not been working with OOUI much in the last year or so, but now am coming back to it, and it's weird but these comments are one thing that stick out to me more than other stuff. There's nothing wrong with them, but they feel like they're in the void that lies between the blocks of code and their docblocks, and it's a surprise to see anything there.
I'm sitting at my new verandah table, with a cup of coffee and the pinging sound of the bridge pile driver in the distance. I like the sound, it's as though an indefatigable giant with good rhythm is bored and banging on the railings. The weather this week is cooler, even cool enough to notice a design flaw in my new table:
The pedestal of the table is cast iron, of large dimensions, which is terrific from the point of view of stability and has the rare feature of not sliding across the floor when you push your feet against it. But it's summer, I'm not wearing shoes, and in resting my feet on the iron I'm getting cold feet.
That screenshot is how the Empire looked between 1900-10-09 when the Cook Islands were added, and 1900-10-19 when Niue was added (not to bowdlerise the act of empire building or anything with a word like 'added').
I've upgraded toolforge:wdlocator to PHP 8.2 and Symfony 7, and in doing so I think have fixed a long-standing (but unknown to me!) bug with how it was selecting the user interface language. It's supposed to change based on the Accept-Language header, but there was a bug with that in our ToolforgeBundle. I think we fixed that bug ages ago, but I forgot to update wdlocator. So now I have, and it can be read in Indonesian at e.g. https://wdlocator.toolforge.org/?uselang=id#map=17/-8.72520/115.17650
(I mention Indonesian, and the map above is centred on Denpasar, because that's where I'm going tomorrow. For the Wikisource Conference.)
I know I should also add a UI for actually selecting a language, but that'll have to wait.
I nerdsniped myself yesterday I guess, and as I've found myself at the airport a bit early (or rather it was quieter than I'd thought it might be and I got through check-in, customs, and security quickly), I'm working on phabricator:T386289.
The modern way (and the old fashioned way; there was a time in between when we thought of it as 'clutter') is to always have a submit button when there's a form input, so I'm going to do that. Something along the lines of this:
Even though that means it takes up two lines instead of one. Perhaps all those things should be hidden in a popup menu of some sort. But that's more work, and the whole sidebar UI of this tool needs an overhaul, so for now I'll just do the bare minimum. Really I want to dig into why the automatic language selection isn't working as expected.
The other thing I've noticed is that there are some languages missing from krinkle/intuition, like Fante. I think I've wondered before about how those are updated, but I can't now remember what the process is. Perhaps that's a nice easy thing to do
An incredibly easy arrival in Bali: I was sitting near the front of the plane so got off quickly, but then getting through immigration look about three minutes. Too quick, as it turned out, because the luggage collection listing had been updated with the wrong info, so I then stood at carousel six for twenty minutes wondering where my bag was — only to find that it was actually carousel three that I should've been at, and where my case was among four others forlornly going around and around on their own.
Sounds like there's amazing work going on in the Philippines around training people (with actual curriculum integration in high schools, if I'm understanding it?) to edit Wikisource —
The first phase comprised the 24-hour basic training course on transcribing, proofreading, and validating of Wikisource pages held from the first week of June toward mid-July 2024. In the second phase, the 40-hour WILMA PH advanced Wikisource workshop commenced with the two-day Bikol Wikisource Training of Trainers (TOT).
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
And this isn’t just about blogs. This relates to portfolios, code snippets, photos. You name it. What’s made by you should be owned and controlled by you.
Web 2.0 failed. True online sharing died a long time ago. So start taking. Take your ideas, your words, your work–and go home.
I've been sorting out a better workflow for uploading to the Internet Archive. It's only just dawned on me that TIFF files are much better supported than PNGs, and so I'm now going to stick to those (actually I have been for quite a while now, but there are still lots of files that I scanned a few years ago that I'm getting sorted out).
If you upload a TIFF, a smaller JPEG gets derived with the same name (just with `.jpg` instead of `.tiff`). I've not yet looked into what size it aims to generate, but they seem to be about one megabyte.
But the overall workflow needs to me more like:
Scan a few images (e.g. multiple pages of a letter, front and back) and give them meaningful names (spaces and other special characters are allowed, but usually best avoided; the actual item title is given separately).
An item accession number is assigned by looking at the previous highest (actually more normally this is by looking at the count of files in the items/ directory). This is confirmed to be unique and unused by making sure the items/1234.md file doesn't exist yet.
The item file is created, and given a title.
The files are uploaded to IA with a command like this:
$ ia upload ArchiveName1234 -m mediatype:image ~/path/to/scans/ArchiveName1234*.tif
Note that the mediatype doesn't actually have to be supplied, and the item will end up as 'data', but that can't be changed later and so it's best to set it to 'image' (for photos) or 'text' (for letters etc.)
The item file is updated with the ArchiveName1234*.jpg filenames. At the moment this is all a bit manual and there's no system that either confirms that they're correct nor that will make sure that there's a connection between the JPEG and the TIFF; I'll probably improve that at some point.
The IA item is updated with a URL pointing to the item's generated HTML file.
The Internet Archive is only used here for files that can not be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, because it's much nicer that anyone can help improve the metadata. IA items can be edited only by the uploader, so they're somewhat immutable blobs (Flickr is similar, in this workflow). It does mean that non-commercial and orphan works can be uploaded though, and that's very useful.
Local history wikis often want to have a page for every street. All the streets! Every named road or street or path or laneway or mall. Some people say it's silly because there's nothing to be said about some of them. But that's okay, everything's silly.
First, find all named highways around a point:
[out:json];
wr["highway"]["name"](around:3000,{{center}});
out geom;
I seem to spent lots of tine cutting off tongues and grooves. I quite enjoy it, although not as much as cutting tongues and grooves, that's a very satisfying task.
I'm feeling a bit excited about MediaWiki again at the moment. It's nice. I used to feel this about web software, back in the day — I think in recent years I've somewhat been affected by the latest fads and trends that have been all about static sites and depending on paid services and generally everything JavaScript. But I'm no dedicated follower of fashion, and there's something pretty great about a PHP app with a database, and generating HTML that the browser just displays.
It was WordPress initially, for me, I think. And not long after, MediaWiki, but also Drupal for a good few years, and Piwigo and various other smaller things. All PHP, or at least almost all (UseModWiki doesn't count, although gosh I've just noticed that it's latest version was only a year and a half ago, so maybe I never needed to have moved on from it at all).
(Overheard while writing this, from the scaffolding foreman standing not far from where I'm sitting: "alright boys, it's okay, if you break a tile — now I'm not saying you will, but if you do — then that's fine, don't worry, just tell me and we'll replace it". Seems a bold thing to say to some tired-looking blokes plonking piles of steel poles on a tiled floor.)
But yeah, it seems like it's good to be excited about the things we build. That always feeling like something is old fashioned and not really "the way it should be done" just leads to feeling negative about it — but more importantly, I think it makes it easier to not put in the effort to keep things in order and being consistent with the system as it already is. I think MediaWiki and many other systems have suffered from people thinking that a) something needs to be improved; b) there's a new system for doing that thing; c) we should switch to that new syste; and d) maybe at some point when we feel like it going back over everything and updating it to the new system. It's no great surprise that the last point is the tricky one, and can take years and sometimes never really be finished.
So I'm going to try to stick with paying attention to the details, to consistency, and to working with what we've got (happily).
(The scaffolders are getting closer and will in one more trip be right next to me I think, so I'll run away now. Although they're now getting sidetracked with telling stories of scaffolding in sulphur mines, which is interesting, and they're good at projecting their voices 50m so I don't really feel that I'm eavesdropping.)
The site redesign that we have been working on for a year is almost ready. Since December, the team has been working around the clock to implement the plans we discussed.
Right now, we are finishing up final details, a handful of Project Leaders are testing pages, and leading app developers are working on modifications to Tree Apps and browser extensions.
We are hoping to release the new site on March 10.
The release won't go smoothly. :-) Our community will be disrupted by all the changes. More fundamentally, there will be many problems. Not all our changes will turn out to be improvements. After the release, we will work together to make things better.
I like the "there will be many problems"! It's always true of any big new thing, and it's nice to see it not being coated in corporate-speak.
I'm reading a book from Black Apollo Press, with heavy smooth floppy paper (it's a paperback); almost too glossy. But it's very nice to read. Stays open well enough. The typos are slightly annoying, but they seem to be getting more widely spaced and who knows, maybe the author wanted an element of the rough and ready? (Probably not.)
There's weird cold wet stuff falling from the sky. Perhaps the scaffolders have hit something? Or is summer over?
I'm looking out over Princess May Park (named after the school that was named after the lady who named it), at a long string of about a hundred teenagers hurrumphing their way across in damp hoodies. Where are they coming from ? To where are they going? Are they on day release? Heading to mass? Hard to know.
And in usual Perth fashion, the rain seems to have already stopped.
(I've just noticed the copyright notice on the above radar image. Do they claim copyright on the rain?! )
Copious use of named subqueries (due to them being isolated by the optimizer) can really help here.
If you are fetching distinct terms (or counts of distinct terms) ensuring that blazegraph can use the distinct term optimization is very helpful. It seems like the blazegraph query optimizer isn't very good and often cannot use this optimization even when it should. Making the group by very simple and putting it into a named subquery can help with this.
An interesting post about Structured Data on Commons, and how to query with it. Reminds me that I have been meaning to add support for it to UnlinkedWikibase (although the weird authentication system is perhaps why I haven't bothered so far).
I'm down at Beach Street, because I wanted to take some photos of the bridge progress. But first I'm encaffienating at a caffe. It has a bit of a view, of which I have taken a bad photo.
This non-content post is just me trying more to treat my blog like social media. Share whatever, whenever. No one reads it, so I'm not too worried. But it is useful to keep all things together — as much as I like the ideals of Mastodon, and wikis.world, things like that are still someone else's server and if I've got my own why do I need that?
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