Sam Wilson's Website

December 2021

  7. ABC Radio Melbourne (Matilda Marozzi)

    Wikipedia 'edit-a-thons' set to amplify Australian music scene's Wikipedia presence

    Wikimedia Australia is calling on passionate music fans to participate in a series of “edit-a-thons” to boost the profile of Australian music on Wikipedia.

    The Record — Australian Music on Wikipedia is holding the first of four events as part of Melbourne Music week this Saturday at the Collingwood Yards.

    The idea is to train volunteers to edit or create new Wikipedia articles about the domestic music scene to increase its visibility worldwide.

    Project coordinator James Gaunt said Wikipedia was one of the most popular websites in the world.

    “Everyone is keen to get Australian musicians known, especially for international audiences,” he said.

  8. Statistics for simple sites

    I’ve got a couple of static websites that I generally want to be low-maintenance and ignorable for multiple years at a time. About the only active part of them is their 404 Not Found pages: they contain Google Analytics reporting, because I want to know if people are failing to find things. I sometimes think it’d also be nice to know what pages people do find, and how often etc. — which of course is what GA does, but I don’t want to load it on every page. I don’t like the idea of feeding the Google machine any more than the bare minimum!

    But I realise that actually the resilience and longtermedness of the websites isn’t all that impacted by some stats-gathering. I can just install Matomo on my VPS, under the same domain names even, and use it there. If one day the VPS is turned off then it’ll stop working, but nothing else will break with the sites. I think this is a better way to do it.

    (Does this mean that I’ll now end up putting analytics on my own blog? Probably! To a person with a Matomo hammer, every website is a data nail an’ all that…)

  9. I’m feeling thoroughly annoyed with the ORM system I’m using in Symfony. All I want to do is merge tags! It should be a matter of an update statement, followed by a delete. But with Doctrine ORM I have to all sorts of confusing things (well, not that confusing, it has to be said, but still…). So I think I might just go back to the simple days when things made sense and database statements behaved properly (i.e. ran when and how you thought they would within a transaction).