http://blog.anubite.co.uk Ponderances of a MediaWiki developer Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:06:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Just a quick heads-up for anyone who cares, but I have no futher intention to continue working on the (uncommitted) Slideshow extension I wrote for MediaWiki back in the summer, nor do I intend to commit the work I was doing on log formatting methods. I don't see myself committing ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/11/06/heads-up/ I dislike moving. Well, I'm back in Bristol again, and another...interesting year it no doubt will be. The house itself is all right - pretty typical student property, if in need of quite a bit of TLC. The good news is that we've got cable up and running, although we plan ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/09/10/moving/ At long last, following the Wikimania conference in Taipei, and a spate of various problems, Brion's been able to sort out the 1.11.0rc1 release candidate (announcement, download links etc.) which means 1.11.0 is on the horizon. It was decided in July this year that the release would be held back at ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/09/06/release-imminent/ As anyone who designs or developers web sites or web application will know, Microsoft Internet Explorer is atrocious, not just in the lack of support for standards, or the more esoteric behaviour it exhibits, but in the lack of decent debugging tools when it goes wrong. With that in mind, Jonathan ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/08/29/debugging-jscript/ I don't really mind who copies or mirrors our upgrade documentation - it's great - but it would be nice if people actually remembered to sufficiently attribute the people who write it in the first place. http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/08/25/dont-steal-my-docs/ I've added some basic EXIF metadata extraction support to the MediaFunctions extension, following a thread on wikitech-l, which uses Tim's excellent work on media handlers, so we can do things like: {{#mediaexif:File.jpg|Make}} I've also introduced a {{#mediadimensions}} parser function, which fetches the natural "dimensions string" from the file - for images, this ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/08/21/mediafunctions/ Well, these images are getting the better of me, eh? Seems I made an (idiotic, now I look on it) assumption about the "timestamp-like" part of file archive names when I wrote the FileRevertForm and the FileDeleteForm, and thus extracted the wrong timestamp for presentation in the UI. Good job ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/08/20/more-image-fun/ Some updates to the RandomImage extension: Captions will now be pulled from the image description page, if possible. Text within <randomimage></randomimage> tags is preferred, if present, otherwise, the first paragraph of the description is used. This idea came from Dave Cook. The extension can now perform a more complex SELECT to ensure ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/08/20/randomimage-14/ There's an interesting gem on the wikien-l mailing list: This is one of the older ideas that's been drifting around WP for years. Trouble is, we don't have the developers to work on this problem. This isn't like policy; we can't be bold and write it. Oh, technically we can, except ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/07/31/ask-and-ye-shall-receive/ In idle browsing of MeatballWiki, which is something I never do often, I came across an interesting statement on http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiCreole: Several wiki engines have agreed to jump on board (including MediaWiki and the Ward's original WikiWikiWeb). This is news to me, I have to admit; from what I can recall, in a ... http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2007/07/29/we-have-have-we/