News (blog)
22 June 2007[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 22 June 2007 at 02:56 | |||
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OD/Wikia Upgraded[edit]The OD/Wikia file structure has been upgraded to a more maintainable structure in preparation for the new Backup & Restore extension. The new structure allows wiki domains to be added or manipulated without requiring the web-server to reload its configuration files. The new directory structure looks like this: /var/www /var/www/mediawiki -> /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0 /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0 /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/extensions -> /var/www/extensions /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/files -> /var/www/files /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0/wiki -> /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.0 /var/www/domains /var/www/domains/peerix.org -> /var/www/settings/peerix /var/www/domains/www.peerix.org -> /var/www/settings/peerix /var/www/domains/wikifs.org -> /var/www/settings/wikifs /var/www/domains/www.wikifs.org -> /var/www/settings/wikifs /var/www/files /var/www/files/peerix /var/www/files/peerix/images /var/www/files/wikifs /var/www/files/wikifs/images /var/www/settings /var/www/settings/peerix /var/www/settings/wikifs The MediaWiki source code for each version are stored in /var/www/ as before and have a standard LocalSettings.php which includes the new wikia.php extension. The wikia.php include sets up some defaults and then includes one of the specific sets of LocalSettings found in the /var/www/settings directory. It find the specific file in settings by checking if the requested domain exists in /var/www/domains, if so it is a symlink to the file in settings that should be used for the domain. Two symlinks must be added to the MediaWiki source, wiki which simply points to the same source code directory (this is so that all relative URL paths can start with /wiki which our friendly-URL's setup requires), and files which links to the directory containing all the wiki's uploaded files areas (doing it this way means that the MediaWiki source files are the root from the public side). |
11 September 2011[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 12 September 2011 at 04:51 | |||
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Experimental nodal interface based on corMVC[edit] We've started an experimental interface for the making a start on the unified ontology by using corMVC which is an existing MVC-based Single Page Application by Ben Nadel. We want to keep the "server-side" layer as thin as possible so that it's essentially doing nothing more than providing persistence and shared context to the nodes which are basically persistent and independent JavaScript "DOM bubbles". CorMVC is an excellent starting point for this goal, because it's extremely light-weight but at the same time very structured and scalable in its design. So far I've skinned it to make it look like a part of the OrganicDesign system, and changed the primary example object type from "contact" to "node". For more information about this project, see Nodal interface using corMVC, or for more information specific to corMVC, see Ben's online demo, and watch his presentation about how it came about and how it works. |
18 May 2008[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 18 May 2008 at 02:21 | |||
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Integrating with MediaWiki SVN[edit]We've recently started moving our most stable and popular extensions into the MediaWiki SVN repository, so that they can evolve through the collaboration of the main developers of the MediaWiki project. We've also started developing the main MediaWiki code-base to allow support for the SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server database engines. Below is a list of the extensions we've moved into SVN.
I was wondering how many of the SVN committers are active and how often, so I made a PERL script to read in all the commits (svn-report.pl) and another (svn-results.pl) to format the results into monthly totals as shown below. The core commits are those changes made to the MediaWiki code-base (the phase3 branch) rather than those made to other areas of the repository such as extension code. The resulting statistics are in the MediaWiki SVN Statistics article.
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11 January 2009[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 11 January 2009 at 05:41 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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Organic Design has moved to a dedicated server[edit]Organic Design has moved from a VPS with VPSLink to a dedicated server with eSecureData. It's an Intel quad-core Q6600 running at 2.4GHz with 500GB of disk, 2GB RAM and 2TB of monthly traffic allowance! The picture to the right is from this Google map and shows the building in Canada where our new server is situated. Even though the Q6600 chips are desktop chips not server chips, it should still be faster than the quad-Xeon VPS we've moved from since the Q6600's cache is the same size (4MB) and the speed is 400MHz faster. Also we're no longer sharing our server resource with other unknown clients which can often cause sharp drops in responsiveness. |
11 June 2007[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 11 June 2007 at 06:55 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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A new template for finding articles[edit]Template:Find is a new template made using the Simple Forms extension to make a more sophisticated search form for the site. The new search form works like usual but has extra buttons for sending the query to Wikipedia or Google, instead of just the usual go and full-text-search buttons. Also if the go button is used and the search query contains one or more "=" characters, it will be treated as a DPL query allowing searching for articles by regular expression, category, template-use and much more. There was no programming required to add this functionality to the wiki because it's all done using the Simple Forms and WikiSkin extensions. Here's a couple of useful query examples:
category=Foo (list all articles in Category:Foo)
uses=News|ordermethod=firstedit (list all articles using Template:News ordered by their creation date)
createdby=Foo (list all articles created by User:Foo) |
6 April 2007[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 6 April 2007 at 08:46 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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New MediaWiki extensions[edit]Some work we've been doing for a client using MediaWiki on their intranet has required us to extend the functionality in various ways. The first example of this was a requirement for a simple security extension since none of the ones available quite suited their needs. Later, we needed to upgrade our tree view extension to handle recursion using normal transclusion syntax, and to allow tree items to be filtered by security permissions. The clients main tree is in the side bar like ours, but has become very large, requiring around 150KB of data to be rendered and transferred for every page request. To get around this problem we created a new extension called Livelets which is used in a similar way to transcluding an article. The difference is that the content in each of the livelets is separately requested by the browser after the main page has loaded. This means that the page becomes responsive almost immediately, and also the browser can locally cache the livelet content to significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth use. Soon the livelets will be able to keep their content up to date automatically without requiring the page to regularly poll the server for change information - hence the name livelet. To achieve this we're using SWF which has far more dynamic and responsive communications methods than AJAX which is currently the dominant dynamic technology within the MediaWiki enviornment. Another extension that has been created to support this development is the Flashlets extension which allows ActionScript source code enclosed within swf tags to be compiled on the fly and embedded as a SWF movie. We've had this capability here on the OrganicDesign wiki for a couple of years now, but Flashlets is very easy to install and works on a normal MediaWiki enviornment of any version. Another aspect of Organic Design which has recently been made available to the MediaWiki community at large is the WikiSkin extension. This will allow us to integrate HTML/CSS/JS templates created by designers into MediaWiki much more simply, and will also help greatly in the creation of new live skins composed of sets of livelets.
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19 June 2013[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 19 June 2013 at 00:20 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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Boycott Ubuntu![edit] I was very dissapointed with the change of the desktop environment to Unity as well which I really can't stand, but the spyware is a real show-stopper for me so it's time for a change. Some other choices I've looked into which look really good are Linux Mint which currently holds the number one position in popularity of Linux distributions, Mageia which is number two, and gNewSense which has the strongest libre-oriented focus.
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17 April 2007[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 18 April 2007 at 12:44 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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Product information wiki[edit]Over the past couple of years we've had more and more articles in out various wikis which are dedicated to information regarding specific products. It seems sensible to store all that kind of information in a wiki dedicated specifically to products. Most of our own requirement for this is in relation to hardware and software and the need to have links, resources and howto's for them, but this wiki can be used for any products at like toothpaste or wine.
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15 October 2011[edit] | |||
| Posted by Nad on 15 October 2011 at 07:10 | |||
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This post has the following tags: News
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OccupyAuckland sets up in Aotea Square[edit] Before I had attended I had little faith in the Occupy movement, believing that while it was good to see that so many people are awakening to the truth of our failing capitalist system, there would be no answers found in "milling about" waiting for the elite to listen to us and "fix things somehow". But after seeing the Occupy Movement in action today, I feel incredibly optimistic, and feel that this movement really could be the start of a new system being built from the bottom up, by the people, for the people! It's not too late to join in, there are people camping out in all of the thousands of Occupy sites around the world. Head down and see what's going on in your local region, ask questions or offer your incites. Get more information at the OccupyAuckland official site and from the general Occupy Movement site. See also: |
22 May 2008[edit] | ||||||
| Posted by Nad on 22 May 2008 at 11:48 | ||||||
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New skin for 2008[edit] Today we've changed the skin from a WikiSkin based skin to a normal MediaWiki skin. If your skin is not showing up like the screenshot to the right, then set it to "OrganicDesign" in your preferences. OrganicDesign has gone through a few other skins over the last few years which are shown below. Click on any of the images to see them at 1:1 resolution.
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