Sam Wilson's Website

Home

  1. Entrance to the exhibition

    The file that is attached to this post.

    The generator was to power the whole thing; the two doors (entrance and exit) are further along with scaffolding over each of them.

  3. Vue in MediaWiki

    I’ve been working on my first real foray into Vue in MediaWiki: a special page that lists all of the pages for which the current user has Edit Recovery data saved (T347673). It’s not something that really needs to use it at the moment (it’s just a simple list), but it’ll evolve soon and be more complicated and hopefully end up looking better.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll learn more of this and get around to helping with moving all that old stuff away from jQuery UI? (The WikiEditor link-insertion dialog comes to mind, because I use that lots). Although I do wonder if I’m doing any of it right.

  4. I’ve been writing mainly on my other sites (and other people’s sites, like wikis.world), and keep forgetting that I’ve got this site here. Probably no one reads it (or any of my other ones), and I guess that’s why I’ve been neglecting it.

  6. Get Blogging!

    This is a good site to point people to when trying to explain why anyone should start a blog:

    https://getblogging.org

    A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

    Remember that your blog is yours! Your posts can contain exactly what you want them to: a sentence of text or a novel-length essay; photos and videos; audio; links and bookmarks. What you want to share is entirely up to you.

  7. ORMs

    I’ve got this weird little project that I’ve been working on a bit, and I keep trying to remove the ORM system. It’s not that ORMs are terrible, they’re not, they’re great sometimes. But when it comes down to it I just find it more annoying. I love looking at the database query report for any given page in the app, and knowing exactly what each is for and that each is useful. It’s just so easy to end up with lots of random look-up queries with an ORM set-up — it seems that it’s common to have a foreign key, and to not actually care about any of the attributes of the foreign record, but the ORM ends up querying for it. I don’t mean the whole “n+1 selects” problem, that’s annoying but not all that hard to avoid. It’s the extra queries that don’t really effect performance that bother me. I’d rather have a bit of a say over what’s run.

  9. sfo2 → syd1

    My websites are now all moved to Digital Ocean in Sydney. They were hosted in a few places overseas (mainly DO in California), and since DO opened their Sydney region I’ve been meaning to switch. It’s quite amazing how much quicker it is! So nice to type in a terminal with 50ms latency instead of 300.

    Whenever I do this sort of thing I wonder if it’s worth carrying on with self-hosting. It takes a little bit of time, sometimes, although not really all that much. The main downside is just the feeling that I don’t really know enough. That said, I’ve been doing it since about 2006 and everything’s sort of gone according to plan in that time.