Fremantle
· MediaWiki · programming · PHP ·
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.)
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam 
samwilson.id.au
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