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This is the full archive for 2020
Creating a TODO list in MediaWiki with Cargo
Fremantle
· Cargo · MediaWiki · tracking ·
When I'm editing items on ArchivesWiki I often want to leave notes about things that need to be followed up, and for a while have been using a simple {{todo}} template for this purpose. It just displayed a simple [TODO] superscript that linked to a category of pages. Its source was just:
<sup>''<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[:Category:To be done|TODO]]{{#if:{{{1|}}}| – {{{1|}}}}}]''</sup>{{#ifeq: {{NAMESPACE}} | Template | |[[Category:to be done]] }}Which, as usual for anything using ParserFunctions conditionals, isn't very readable. It also didn't let me easily see a list of the pages along with what needed to be done with them. So I decided to add a 'comment' field to the template, and add a Cargo table so that the page name and comment could be displayed together on a todo overview page.
The template:
<noinclude>
{{#cargo_declare: _table = todos | comment = String }}
</noinclude><includeonly>
{{#cargo_store: _table = todos | comment = {{{1|}}} }}
</includeonly>{{#invoke: todo | main | comment={{{1|}}} }}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>The module:
local p = {}
p.main = function ( frame )
local args = frame.args
local sup = mw.html.create( 'sup' )
sup:attr( 'class', 'todo' )
local em = sup:tag( 'em' )
em:wikitext( mw.text.nowiki( '[' ), '[[Project:To be done|TODO]]' )
if args.comment ~= nil and args.comment ~= '' then
em:wikitext( ' – ' .. args.comment )
end
em:wikitext( mw.text.nowiki( ']' ) )
return tostring( sup )
end
return pThe summary table:
{{#cargo_query: tables = todos
| fields = _pageName=Page, comment=Comment
| format = table
}}Diagrams extension
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · extensions · Diagrams · GraphViz · Mscgen · PlantUML ·
I've made a page for my new MediaWiki Diagrams extension, even though I'm not really done with the proof-of-concept yet. Seemed like it was working enough to put something up as a placeholder.
I was going to get a demo set up on toolforge:genealogy, but it looks like GraphViz isn't installed on the web server image. I'll dig into that later, and maybe get it running at https://diagrams.archives.org.au instead, for now.S124
We shouldn't call them 'wikis', but rather 'open linked-data semantic ERPs'!
S125
There's lots of crap news out there in the world, again. I am trying to avoid the news (Twitter, Guardian, ABC mainly) in the mornings, because I find that I just get depressed. Not that it's not all depressing — Australia is burning and the government seems to actively not care — but there's not that much that I can do, and it's making it hard to get any work done.
Is it bad to give up like this though? I feel like I should be doing more. But also that, soon enough, we're probably all going to be forced into doing more! So for now, I'm enjoying tinkering on the wikis and feeling the sea breeze blow through my house.Cleaning up the MsUpload code
Perth
S126
It's hot again! The last week or so in Perth has been amazing in its lack of the horrible heat that's been inflicted in the rest of Austrlia. It's feeling like summer again today though.
Climate protest, Perth
Forrest Place, Perth
· protests ·
I'm at a climate rally in Perth, in a crowd of about 400. I've given up sitting in the corner editing Wikisource (for the time being) because I thought I'd better do something. So I'm standing around quietly, sending bad vibes at the scumbo prime minister and all the pollies who think it's okay to do stuff all.
S128
It's a morning in South Fremantle. Just a morning. I was going to write 'lovely' or 'rubble' or 'viewish', but actually I'm too tired for adjectives. The main thing I noticed is that walking down Martha Street is nicer than walking down Lefroy Road, although both give views to the ocean. Crossing Hampton Road is harder there though.
I have never yet gotten tired of walking over the brow of the hill (is this whole limestone ridge called Booyeembara?) and seeing the sea.Departing Perth
Perth Airport
· MediaWiki · airports · versions ·
S130
test
- So like you said, commenting is pretty much just editing the post, right? Or did I misunderstand how to leave a comment? Definitely want to do some digging and see if there's a way for someone to leave a comment on an entry without having access to edit my entry. Hrm... Shawndouglas (talk) 01:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
- @Shawndouglas: Not quite: the {{blog post comments}} template is just editing the talk page, which is then transcluded to the bottom of the main page. I'm not convinced it's the best way to do it thought! Welcome (talk) 01:39, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
Reducing a Digital Ocean volume in size
Fremantle
· system administration · Digital Ocean · volumes ·
For my own future reference:
- Create new volume.
- Mount it:
sudo mount -o discard,defaults,noatime /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_data2 /mnt/data2
- Stop Apache:
sudo apache2ctl stop
- Copy everything from old to new with rsync (note trailing slashes):
rsync -av /mnt/data/ /mnt/data2/
- Unmount the old volume:
sudo umount /mnt/data
- Mount new to old place:
sudo mount -o discard,defaults,noatime /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_data2 /mnt/data
- Restart Apache:
sudo apache2ctl start
- Edit the entry in fstab to use the new volume ID:
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_data2 /mnt/data2 ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0
- Remove the temporary mount point:
sudo rmdir data2/
- Restart to make sure everything comes back up as it should (this isn't an elegant way to do this—but I'm lazy, not many people use this server, and this definately tests what I want it to).
sudo shutdown -r now
Typing pain
Fremantle
Today is a painful day. No more than yesterday, and enough to be annoying. It's the typing that does it! Of course. So I'm typing this... hmm. I guess I don't learn.
Well, anyway: mostly I'm excited about EMWCon in April (there's lots of discussion about it going on in the #emwcon:matrix.org room. And also general wiki stuff, like getting on top of a few sysadmin tasks on my own server and that of WMAU. Good to feel like things are organised; that's the fundamental idea of wikis I think. Not that blathering on a blog is much 'organisation'. Someone was asking on Reddit the other day about using MediaWiki for blogs, and it got me thinking again about what's missing here.
The biggest thing is commenting, of course, but I don't know if that really matters... I never get any comments anyway (I mean I didn't when I used WordPress and had them enabled). I think mostly I'd like a webmention system that could list at the bottom of a wiki page all incoming links from out on the wide web. Surely that's possible? When I've sorted out the twenty things on my todo list I might look into that...Flatie
Perth
· coffee · OpenStreetMap · copyright · data · open content ·
I am in a café in Perth where for the first time I've heard a flat white called a 'flatie'. I guess that's a thing.
I'm heading to the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute's National Bushfire Recovery Map-a-thon. This is a national event that's happening today, at a bunch of office locations in cities around Australia and with lots of other people taking part distributedly. I'm looking forward to it, especially if the waiver comes through soon to enable the use of new Nearmap imagery for OpenStreetMap tracing. I've not looked at it yet, but I've heard that it's really high resolution.
There's been a bit of discussion about how SSSI have handled this thing though: it sounds like they originally thought they could use OSM tools but not contribute the data back to OSM. (I mean, that's quite possible, but not without hosting the tools yourself; to use them as found on the web, all the data needs to be open.) This is such a common thing — not just with OSM, but also the Wikimedia universe. It sounds like there are lots of great people on the case (on both sides) and I'm so grateful for the people who do this sort of work. I love contributing, but I've no head for the interminable discussions that are such a crucial part of shaping the direction of things.Msmtp
Fremantle
I've switched to msmtp from ssmtp. It's actually maintained; that seems good. With some help, I've got a super simple setup to get it working with Gmail:
In /etc/msmtprc:
defaults
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
auth on
user serveraccount@gmail.com
password foobar123
from serveraccount@gmail.com
aliases /etc/aliasesAnd /etc/aliases (with my own email address):
default: admin@example.orgSet it up as the default sendmail:
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/sbin/sendmailecho 'test'|sudo sendmail -d -t www-dataS132
I wonder if there's any sort of indieweb:Homebrew Website Club in Perth?
Self-Hosted Show
Fremantle
· podcasts · self-hosting ·
78
Self-contained websites
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · wikis · Wikimedia Commons ·
It's Friday afternoon (nearly beer o'clock) at the end of this first week of everyone working from home and all the events being postponed. It's strange, but not that strange from the point of view of someone (me) who already works from home and doesn't really go to many things in person. I am missing the Riff coworking space and Thursday night meetups in Perth, but there's something nice about having an empty calendar. Actually, my calendar is more full than ever, with lots of new online meetings; which is great.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm pondering how a MediaWiki installation can reinforce the self-contained nature of a website. Because it doesn't support hotlinking images or embedding off-site things like Twitter cards, it means that all text and resources required are kept in the wiki. This means nothing gets lost as a result of other people changing their sites (or, rather, everything or nothing gets lost, because wikis do go off the air often enough). I like this attribute of MediaWiki. It's super annoying sometimes, but it makes for more robust websites, that can be archived wholesale and restored down the track in their entirety.
One key way that self-containment is broken is with InstantCommons, because files included from Commons can be deleted there and the local wiki would never know. There are some ways around that, and I've been meaning to see what it'd take to get the Commons Deletion Notification Bot working on 3rd party wikis, but it is at least a single point of failure. One workaround is to make sure every Commons file used on a wiki is on ones watchlist on Commons. On my own wiki, I have InstantCommons turned off — because I used to use it a fair bit, but then something happened and I got grumpy about it and turned it off. Now I copy some things across (with appropriate attribution and linking, of course), and am generally happier knowing that the pages here are not going to be broken when other people change things elsewhere.S528
Fremantle
Long-term websites
Fremantle
· websites · Netlify · Digital Ocean · self-hosting · Wikimedia Commons · Internet Archive · Flickr ·
I have lately been attempting to move some of the stuff that I host on my VPS to a more long-term, cheaper, and 'archival' platform. For this, I figure a static HTML website combined with hosting images on Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, and Flickr, is the way to go. The source text is kept on Github, and rendered to HTML that's uploaded to Netlify.
This all works (although I've still got lots of file-shuffling to do), and means that the only part that I still pay for (and therefore will disappear when I stop doing that) is the domain name. I figure that's okay, because a) it is not too expensive; b) the content is still available on other sites (albeit not in a nice all-in-one website); c) Netlify provide *.netlify.com subdomains; and d) the site could be rebuilt and moved to a new domain if need be.
I don't know if this is the optimal set-up, but it feels a bit more resilient than what I've been doing for the last ten years or so. And interestingly, it makes me feel more able to walk away from these projects (while being happy that they're still online)
and not have them taking up so my space in my brain.Cargo-Lua best practices by River
Fremantle
· EMWCon · Cargo · Lua · MediaWiki · conferences · videos ·
EMWCon has finished for this year. It's all been online, but still run in UTC-4 (it was going to be held in Ohio, USA), so unfortunately I've only been able to attend a couple of sessions at the start and end of the days. Luckily, all talks were recorded and are now on Youtube.
This morning, I've been catching up on Cargo/Lua Best Practices, and When Not To Use Them by Megan Cutrofello (aka RheingoldRiver). Two things that I found interesting were her advice to
- not use
_pageNameunless it's to actually get the page name; don't use it as a primary key (instead add a separate field to use as a PK, one that doesn't change ever); and - not to output wikitext in Lua (but use mw.html instead).
Cube boxes from Albox
Fremantle
· genealogy · storage · boxes · Albox ·
Things not quite right with Markdown
Together on the carpark
Fremantle
· Fremantle · art · Queensgate · carparks ·
Write a journal
Fremantle
—We are witnessing a critical time in history. You should keep a diary by Paul Daley,As social isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic continues, our daily travails become ever more mundane. But to writers, historians and researchers 20, 50, 100 years hence, the records of them will be priceless – the voices that will drive narratives examining this remarkable time.
The backlog will never be done
Fremantle
The Backlog, 15 April 2020 by prtksxna:
My answer, when feeling positive, is just to carry on regardless, and to think as little as possible about the bigger picture. Especially at the moment. Do the next thing that feels like a good thing, and repeat. But I totally concur with "getting comfortable with constant bothering"!…
As you constantly move closer to death – the time you have is decreasing, but, your backlog is increasing, often exponentially. This is not sustainable!
So what are we supposed to do? Prune? Prioritize? Panic? I’ve been practicing an unhealthy balance of these three for a while and am increasingly getting comfortable with its constant hum bothering me.
…
More about installing MediaWiki extensions with Composer
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · Composer · system administration ·
I'm excited, there's a new RFC being proposed that'll solidify MediaWiki's support for installing extensions and skins with Composer: T250406 RFC: Hybrid extension management.
At the same time, there's a conflicting RFC to, on the face of it, prevent that: T250406 Remove ability to install extensions and skins with composer.
Luckily, I think the second one is actually aiming to get rid of the possibility of extensions specifying MediaWiki itself as a Composer requirement, and so there is actually no conflict.
All a bit confusing, but a step forward hopefully for casual sysadmins who want to maintain a MediaWiki installation and easily keep all its extensions and skins up to date.
Maybe it'll also mean that extension authors actually tag their extensions with SemVer version numbers, which would be brill and make it easy for sysadmins to control what sort of upgrade they're doing.Friday morning
Fremantle
It's a Friday in April. Which doesn't really mean anything, other than that it's slightly chillier than it was a couple of weeks ago, and I get to ponder what I will do on the weekend. I have some obvious next steps to take on my garden bench project, but I have to tackle them without getting sidetracked by any of the other interesting things I want to do as well. Why are there so many fun things to do? I usually manage to fail to do any of them.
I've been uploading some files to ArchivesWiki, and catching up with some proofreading. It's all been on hold for a month or so because of some ideas I had around file storage, copyright, Commons, Flickr, and the price of storage on Digital Ocean. I think ultimately, moving to DO Spaces has made the last of these make the decision about the rest — it's now cheap enough to keep hosting everything myself, and I'll carry on copying some of the more interesting items to Commons when appropriate. I've had good luck copying some things to Flickr too, because then more people see them and tell me what info I've gotten wrong. But perhaps all that's needed is a better notification system from ArchivesWiki itself?George Spearing's week in a hole
Fremantle
A new work recently added to Wikisource is the Wonderful account of Mr. George Spearing, in which George recounts the week he spent stuck at the bottom of a coal pit in Scotland. He ends with the ghastly:
I was conveyed home, and every mean used for strengthening my limbs, which were much benumbed with the damp and coldness of the pit; but, thro' the ignorance of my physicians, a mortification seized both my feet, by which the skin and all the nails of my left foot, and three from my right foot, came off like a glove. The flesh at the bottom of my foot being separated from the bones, I had it cut off; and it was 9 months after before I recovered.— I have since been the father of 9 children.
Rain on a Saturday
Fremantle
Wiki calendar exporting
Fremantle
Traditionalism on the wikis
Fremantle
There's a discussion happening on wikimedia-l; I had no idea of the "highest ideal of the Prussian civil servant", but it sounds sensible. Ziko van Dijk writes:
It seems to me that many Wikipedians or Wikimedians think of themselves as being progressive and modern. Our wikis are a tribute to science and enlightenment. Spontaneity and a laissez-faire-attitude are held in high regard; "productive chaos" and "anarchy" are typical for wikis.
When I had a closer look at our values and ideas, I got the impression that the opposite is true. Many attitudes and ideals sound to me more like bureaucracy and traditionalism:
- being thorough, with regard to content and writing about it
- community spirit
- treating everyone equally without regard of the person (the highest ideal of the Prussian civil servant)
- individual initiative
- reliability
Breaking the indieweb
Fremantle
· indieweb ·
I probably do stuff around with my website too much (I have again today nuked it and rebuilt it), but what's the point of having a personal site if you can't hack on it?
Update: I broke it more than I thought, and have now maybe unbroken it. Who knows.Discourse in MediaWiki
Fremantle
· Discourse · MediaWiki ·
Oooooooooo.io
Slightly-odd wiki of the day.
HMW Folder 1 almost done
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · scanning · genealogy ·
I've reached the end of another archive folder: filled it up progressively over the last few months of scanning and describing. Now I'm going back through, double-checking the catalogue records and making sure everything's in order and recorded correctly. It's a nice process, because the first time round, when scanning the photos and letters, I don't actually pay all that much attention to them other than to figure out a reasonable title and a few initial tags. In this second run through I pad things out where they need to be, adding extra tags and descriptions, and sometimes creating additional cropped versions of interesting parts of images.
This time I'm also taking it a step further, and adding all of the items to Wikimedia Commons. I'm not yet completely convinced that this is the best place to host them all (well… I am convinced, but am still very slightly worried that others won't agree with me) but there are have been many occasions in the past when I've been adding these items to my own websites and I've also wanted to upload them to Commons. It is much easier to first upload to Commons and then reuse on my sites. However, the biggest thing that's prompting me to do this is probably the fact that I'm scanning larger and larger resolutions, and my cheapskate hosting setup keeps running out of RAM and failing to resize them. Commons never fails me like this!
So hopefully, all of these scans are now going to be safely housed on Wikimedia Commons forevermore, and I'll be able to do things like improve.
New Westralia
Fremantle
Scanning 1975
Fremantle
I've been helping my dad to scan some slides of his from 1975. It's great fun, seeing these old photos merge from the scanner, and slightly strange seeing my parents as young people.
My grandfather did not take well to people putting up "no trespassing" signs:
HWC West Coast, June 2020
Fremantle
· indieweb · meetups ·
It's rare that online events are at reasonable times for me in UTC+8; usually they're aimed at UTC+1ish or UTC-5ish. Today is the Homebrew Website Club West Coast online meetup, which is named after the US west coast but I figure I can pretend it means all west coasts.
It's starting with an hour of quiet writing time. That feels like a strange but wonderful thing to have on a conference call.
The idea of the indieweb has been coming up a bit lately in my life, and I've got a tiny side project to attempt to create mw:Extension:Webmentions — given that I've resigned myself to using MediaWiki for blogging! I don't know if it'll work, because there are a few things that don't really gel well with the unstructured-pages-of-text approach of wikis. Sending webmentions should be straight forward, because on any link it's possible to send something to the target and it's not necessary to know anything about the structure of the wiki page that the link is on. Receiving them on the other hand might be trickier. All I'm working on at the moment is adding a generic notice on the talk page; I guess it wouldn't be too hard to extend it to pulling in some common post types from the sending page. Some of the stuff I'd love to get working is around events and RSVPs, but maybe the unstructured wiki way will not handle that very well.
Anyway, it's good fun.Writing in the past
Rottnest
· indieweb · blogging · dates ·
date property of the correct time — but what is that time? Is it the date of an event? The day after? And what does it mean for feeds, do they stick to chronological, and so probably not show anachronistic posts? It's all a bit confusing.S606
Rottnest
Bald hill
Rottnest
· Rottnest · exploring · Bald Hill · ruins ·
Bald Hill is not at all bald. I assume at some point it was, but it now has head-height acacias growing all over it, and from the direction of approach of the old access track it's nearly impossible to get through. I later figured out that the opposite slope is much clearer, but I was following the track and wondering why it was strewn with lumps of grey concrete so I pushed on through the scrub.
It turns out there's a very sizable concrete footing extant there, with massive reinforcing sticking out of it. There's a water tank further up the hill, and lots of red brick rubble about. I have no idea what it was all for, but I presume WWII stuff (it looks similar to other brick and concrete ruins I've come across on the island). The size of the footings certainly makes it seem likely.
I'll upload more photos here later; the only ones I have on my phone are crappy due to a scratch on the lens (which, I've just read, might be fixable). My camera works well, and I had my GPX turned on so shall have coordinates for all this too — when I'm back at the computer.
S608
S133
Rottnest
S134
I'm not very good at remembering to blog.
Auto-creation failed
Fremantle
I don't quite know what's going wrong yet, but with two wikis now I've had the following error when trying to log in after upgrading to 1.34: "Auto-creation of a local account failed: Username entered already in use. Please choose a different name."
The error seems to go away after the session expires, and the user is logged in correctly (sometimes after a subsequent error of "Auto-creation of a local account failed: You have not specified a valid username.").Ootong and Lincoln
Fremantle
· checkins ·
Sitting at Ootong and Lincoln, working on the Diagrams extension.
I don't want it to have to serve up map files for mscgen images (Mscgen only generates imap files, rather than the more modern map HTML that Graphviz'scmapx produces).Diagrams rendered locally
Fremantle
Genealogy demo site not working
Fremantle
The demo wiki for the Genealogy extension has been offline since the switch from wmflabs.org to toolforge.org, but it's now working again.
Trenches and boring in Fremantle
More pipes
Fremantle
· pipes · Fremantle · photography · wikis ·
Anyone would think I'm obsessed with holes being dug in Freo streets, but really most of this week I've been squarely concerned with MediaWiki stuff. It's just that in moments of walking time I find myself near these places. This afternoon it was Phillimore Street where they say they've uncovered old wooden aquaducts or something. Unfortunately they're all covered up.
Mostly I'm now trying to get away from all the hosted services and build things myself. To that end I'm attempting a better system of photo metadata management based on 3 wikis and a wmcli script to read exif data. Will see where it gets to.
.jpg)
Joining the Indie Web, One Step at a Time
Fremantle
This is a repost of Joining the Indie Web, One Step at a Time () by :
I need to set up IndieAuth. I’ve been struggling to understand the value of using my own website to log in to other websites, an IndieWeb principle, but finally had an aha! moment when reading through the IndieWeb wiki. I have been trying to wean myself from Google services little by little, but I’ve used the same Gmail account to sign up for services over the past ten years, and it hasn’t seemed worth the effort to switch all those logins to another email address just because – especially since I’m currently using Gmail to serve my emails to my personal domains. But using my own website to log in, I think, opens up a new avenue for easing my dependence on Gmail. For me, this feels like a tool that will make the switch more feasible.
Getting news only from RSS
Fremantle
I'm wondering at the moment if it's possible to avoid Twitter etc. and just use my RSS feed reader for everything. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to do indieweb reposts, with the {{repost}} template. It's not working well so far. I probably need to go back to some ideas I had about an easier way to import parts of posts to this site (e.g. a button that creates the page prefilled with all metadata etc.).
At least I can muck around here and no one will see. Or at least, because I keep no logs, I won't know that anyone's seen.Stepping Off in a window display
Fremantle
· Stepping Off · books · Tom Wilson ·
OSMF active-contributor membership
Fremantle
· OpenStreetMap · OSM Foundation · membership ·
There's a new way to join the OpenStreetMap Foundation, for active OSM editors:
Website status
on the train near Subiaco
· writing · blogging · websites ·
I've been working in various fronts lately, none of which have been my own website. This place feels like a complete mess, but I do have plans for it. I've been making some slight progress towards having all my photos here (or at least spread over my three personal wikis), and I also need to sort out the RSS feed situation (which is currently based on a fairly annoying and slow system). The indieweb HWC meetup was this morning but I wasn't awake enough for it, unfortunately.
Of course, the main point of a blog is to write, and I'm terrible at that at the moment. There's too much to write, and not enough time. Or at least, the time for writing exists quite separate to the time when the inspiration comes – at some point I'd like to sit quietly of a morning, explaining what I'm trying to do. But instead, I'm too busy banging my head against what I'm doing to relax enough to do that! Oh well. Another day.Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
Fremantle
· blogging · wikis · indieweb ·
This is a repost of Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet () by :
Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.
…
Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”
…
“The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.” In an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.”
Reshaping my small plane blade
Fremantle
· sharpening · Men's Shed · woodworking ·
SVG graphs with the Diagrams service
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · GraphViz · Diagrams ·
I've just released version 0.6.1 of the Diagrams extension. It makes it possible to use formats other than PNG when using the external web service to render graphs.
I'm not really sure there's a point to having the external service — it does make things harder for sysadmins, and now there's local rendering that works with the AWS extension, perhaps it should be retired. Then again, there's something nice about not filling a wiki's file storage with re-renderable image files. Anyway, I don't have that much time to work on this so it'll probably stay.
The main thing that the local rendering is now missing is support for PlantUML.Search bangs
Fremantle
· DuckDuckGo · searching · OSM ·
I make great use of DuckDuckGo's bang feature, with which you can change your search target by typing <search term> !<bang code>, where bang code is any of the defined codes. For example, I saw a map just now of a place called 'Erdalen' and didn't know where it was, so I pressed ctrl-L to enter Firefox's address/search bar, and typed !osm erdalen and it took me straight to this place south of Bergen in Norway.
!osm are !w for Wikipedia, !wd for Wikidata, and !r for Reddit.Happy 16th centimillenium
Fremantle
· unix · time · timestamps · events ·
Another year of WMAU tech stuff
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · WMAU · wikis · system administration ·
The Wikimedia Australia AGM was yesterday, and I'm signed up for another 12 months of being the tech nerd on the Committee, running the wikis and whatnot. I quite like doing it, although I'm not always very good at keeping up to date with everything — it's nice to run a MediaWiki installation outside of the WMF world, just to have a feel of what it's like and what annoyances are felt. I'm going to try to improve things this year (better mobile view; stats reporting maybe; and generally keeping everyone up to date with things).
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Fremantle
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