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. 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.
Crane over the new police station
InputBox parameters and form submission
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · MediaWiki · searching · InputBox ·
Thanks to a recent wish I've been poking a bit at the InputBox extension lately, to make it work better with MediaSearch and CirrusSearch. This involves making it honour the user preference for Special:Search or Special:MediaSearch (if the extension for the latter is installed), and fixing up the way in which it passes its searchfilter parameter to the search page.
The fix for the first issue was to set the initial form action (which ends up in the parser cache and so can't be user-specific) to the site's default, and then have a front-end switch that dynamically changes it to whatever the current user has as their preference. Slightly clunkily, this involves sending both possible URLs to the front end and then choosing between them, because otherwise they wouldn't be localised.
The second issue came about because InputBox submits search and searchfilter values as separate GET parameters, and then on loading the special page it would changes the internal request object to have a unified value (i.e. these two values concatenated with a space between them). The trouble with that was that you'd end up at a URL like Special:Search?search=foo&searchfilter=insource:Bar and so anything that was accessing the search value directly would get it wrong. So the fix was to unify the values and then redirect to a new URL without searchfilter, and also to skip that redirect by doing the same sort of replacement in the front-end. So most people will not get the redirect, but we always aim to have a no-JS fallback. I did wonder about switching the input names around so that there's no visible change to the text input, which might be confusing to people who see it change but only after they've clicked submit and so there's no time to notice what it's doing.
I think there are similar improvements that could be made to other parts of InputBox, such as type=move with a prefix, but no one's complained about that not working so I don't think I'll bother digging any further for now.
A walk to the scout hut
East Fremantle
Cooperative self-hosting
Fremantle
· web hosting · cooperatives ·
Local Hosting Co-Op by lovestha, 8 March 2025:
Whether a formal one or not, formal co-ops can be expensive to set up, people helping each other is a nice way to do things. Running a mail and file server for yourself, or for 50 people is a lot less than 50x the work. It isn’t even 50x the infrastructure costs. A fediverse server may buck this trend, as moderation work probably advances faster than linearly with user count. Tensions between local and remote users scales linearly, while tensions between local users scales more like n^2 (at small values of n) as there are more local interpersonal dynamics that can spawn drama. Those are in contrast to a single user instance where essentially all of those dramas are 0.
So a couple of IT adepts doing the IT side of things, a few willing tributes to moderate the fediverse server, and you have a co-op that could see to the prime Internet service needs of a small community.
Another great advantage to this approach is that there's more redundancy with three "IT adepts" running things (than there is with solo self-hosting).
Reminds me of how we used to do co-operista.com, c.2006.
James the Trains
At home with James the Trains, Nationwide (BBC One), 26 January 1972:
This man's complete devotion to one thing — trains — gives him a peace of mind, and an independence, that most people will never begin to know.
2025-07-02
Fremantle
I finally bought a copy of Four Rivers Deep Maps this morning, on my way to the bottom of High Street.
Then, immediately afterwards I found what I thought was the Scottish saltire (the book is about Perth here and Perth there):
But actually I seem to remember that it's not, and that there's some navigation flag that has the same design.
2025-07-01
Moving away from US hosting
Fremantle
· web hosting ·
Re-evaluate, by Juha Liikala, 2 March 2025:
The recent events in the US have made me seriously re-evaluate the idea of using US-based services for web hosting, social media, streaming, and all that jazz. I’m deeply saddened by the state of things, but it is what it is. I know there are a lot of good folks out there in the US (hopefully the majority) fighting the good fight. But in the end, the way things have progressed is forcing my hand to take some drastic measures.
I’ve been moving things to European services where I can, but the reality is that—especially in the web space—most of the best services are based in the US. Replacing them is really hard. At this point, it’s impossible to replace all of them. And I feel torn about having to reconsider even those services that I believe have responsible ownership.
I'm definitely trying to figure out how to shift a couple of things I'm hosting with US companies. The trouble is things like Digital Ocean, who are a US company but who offer cheap hosting on servers in Australia. Most Australian-owned similar services cost lots more (I guess because they're much smaller).
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