Who's that fat bastard in the black?

[hirez]

As is usual post That Sort Of Thing, I feel like I've been stretched out and filled with hot sand. Dunno that the things-in-containers will have survived the first hot and dry week this year, which of course coincided with being in t'north, but there we are.

Spent much of Tuesday writing on the roof-terrace at our accommodations, and thus have a reasonable sunburn. I think I fail at g*th.

also fail at photogenic. Again. Jayzus.

Someone else can collect the set of stupid things that JHR said while drunk or hungover. (Writing tip: ideas are never the problem. It's execution.) Man whose head expanded. Yes.

Right, the other stupid idea (the first stupid idea was 'Tat cricket', since 'Tat shooting' is somewhat last decade and likely without venue) is a thing that will be called 'The WGW ephemera project'. This is largely an excuse to photograph the contents of my LL Bean bag (where all the laminates end up) and the carefully folded pile of official and somewhat-less-so Whitby shirts. You are obviously invited to join in.

The first obvious question/statement is 'I'm going to guess that free (media)wiki hosting is worth exactly what you pay for it and I guess I'd better go cap-in-hand to that nice Mr. Gradwell.' The second one is 'I'll also guess that a MediaWiki install is a complete nightmare and I probably don't want one of those.'

Dad's much better. Quality timing there, as usual.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Self-hosting MediaWiki for home use is a piece of cake, modulo cramming in the 23 extra extensions needed for it

Wikia for community projects

I need proofreaders for my book too (the MediaWiki one)

[reddragdiva]

Extensions are a candy store of fun! And, like candy, eat too many and your wiki will throw up.

I also most heartily recommend the use of MediaWiki for office intranets. Particularly if it's not the official corporate intranet, but the thing where people write what they actually find useful.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Best part about extensions is the way they force Real Programmers to sit down and write PHP. 8-)

[reddragdiva]

That would be MediaWiki itself. Tim Starling is appropriately fascist about what he lets into the core. (It's not really "PHP coding," it's "obscenely overoptimised MySQL coding that happens to be in PHP.")

Unfortunately, quite a lot of extensions are written in what appears to be TRS-80 BASIC. Real weenies can write TRS-80 BASIC in any language, but PHP seems to particularly facilitate it.

[meltie.livejournal.com]

MW's not actually that much of a bast to install, thank God.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I imagine it's 'apt-get install mediawiki' on Beardian and 'Install GCC depot, install gmake depot, install entire GNU toolchain, rebuild system Perl with GCC rather than HP CC, fire up CPAN, reinstall all the modules, drop out of CPAN and hand-build the modules that failed due to wanting -DXPG4...' on HP-UX.

Not that I think weenix coders are a bunch of bastards or something. No.

[reddragdiva]

I tried installing it on Solaris 9. I finally got it installed, but my one-line summary is "You don't want to do this." I expect Solaris 10 with OpenCSW or similar would be tolerable.

Leengux.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Tolerable, but not recommended.

[reddragdiva]

Perzackly. At this job our MediaWiki intranet is on Solaris 10 x86, but I'm glad I wasn't the one going through the prerequisite faff.

Installing on CentOS 4.5 (RHEL 4.5) in the previous job, I made my life a little easier by installing a few CentOSPlus RPMs (updated PHP, ImageMagick, etc).

Oh yes - be sure to set MW up to use ImageMagick (much better than GD) and rsvg (a nightmare to install from scratch, piss-easy if it's in a repo).

[reddragdiva]

In fact, MW is easier to install on Windows than on Solaris.

(The main practical use of Windows installation is when you're forced to install it there at gunpoint, then when the server is creaking under the load you swap the OS out underneath and everything is suddenly three times faster.)

[meltie.livejournal.com]

Eeeesh. Ow.

[reddragdiva]

You can apt-get it from the Beardian (or unbuntu) repo, but that'll be a slightly crusty version. I recommend you hand-install the PHP from the tarball and update at least annually.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

No, it's PHP rather than the rest. If your box already has PHP & MySQL (which might have been painful), the increment to get MediaWiki on there too is drama-free. ImageMagick too, if you're expecting images to work (even for read-only, it needs to scale out the thumbnails).

What's HP-UX?

What, for that matter, is a HP?

[reddragdiva]

I think they make phones now.

[reddragdiva]

MediaWiki is fatally easy to install. The WMF admins do it rather a lot, so the install process is pretty slick. Particularly if you can cope with a command line.

You want to install it on a Leengux box. Any Unix theoretically supports it; in practice, you want to install it on a Leengux box.

Useful thing to do: the MySQL text search is usable on a small wiki, but set it to index on three-letter words as well as four-letter words.

MediaWiki has the robustness of a tank, the firepower of a tank, the manoeuvrability of a tank and the petrol mileage of a tank. WMF only doesn't fall over by having several layers of caching. If you're putting it on the Internet, memcached is a good idea, as is an HTTP accelerator (squid or varnish) in front.

The mediawiki-l list is pretty helpful, the actual developers do read it.

Any tricky questions, just ask.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Default text search for MediaWiki is basically just not there. If you expect to ever use it (which you will), then you _must_ install something else, and that something should be Lucene-based. MWSearch for a quiet life.

Also do this on day one, otherwise the complain mass of whining lusers will adopt the view that "You can't find anything on the wiki" and the whole thing goes to buggeration forever.

Is this corporate or home-spodding? If you're dealing with lusers en masse, there's a book out there called "Wiki patterns" (or somesuch) with an associated free website of design patterns as applied to getting a wiki installed properly on your wetware. Although I expect you'll run a mile from such a thing on the principle that it's fluffy-headed bollocks, it's actually useful.

[reddragdiva]

I find the MySQL full-text search entirely adequate for intranets - presumably it would be usable for small wikis in general (a few hundred or a few thousand pages).

I looked at Lucene but it's made entirely of faff. Fat faff.

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

Fail at photogenic? You can't capture cool on camera...

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

I think I fail at g*th

No bad thing, surely?

[reddragdiva]

Oh - if you're going to have nontechies editing, wait for MW 1.16 and install the matching version of FCKEditor - a WYSIWYG editor that's actually pretty good. I'm about to do a test install with MW 1.16b2 and FCK, to get more people to use our intranet wiki.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Jeez... I hate FCKEditor. Just the whole wrong fecking thing altogether.

You want web design? Write some web pages. Go use Frontpage if you insist. Buy a Mac and some ironic footwear.

You want to do something valuable inside a business? Communicate Useful Stuff from A to B? Use a wiki, put some content into it and stop nancing around pretending to be a web dezyner. Content goes in the hole at the top, the wiki sorts out the rest. MW, unlike past history, even makes it look pretty nice.

The competition for MW in any sort of suit-office isn't DreamWeevil, it's the infernal ShitePoint. The useful task is publishing content, not faffing about pretending to do design.

[reddragdiva]

You might think that, but the reason the BBC's intranet wiki is Confluence rather than MediaWiki is because they balked at the lack of WYSIWYG.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I stopped using BBC internal IT policy as a best practice back when I saw them in action at Bismarck's sausage factory. I haven't seen them using Confluence myself, but I have seen the BBC's take on internal comms and I have seen a few Confluence intranets and both of them had fallen right into that same trap of thinking that technique becomes meaning. Glossy and shiny to look, but they're pissing away money on bright young things with nice hair and thinking that this counts as doing useful work.

M'learned JH-R's workplace seems to favour the other extreme, that of the cobbler's children's shoes. Which can be a somewhat gritty experience for the poor users trying to feed the CMS, but they achieve much in their real output with comparatively little expenditure.

[reddragdiva]

Our official intranet here is Plone. It's made entirely of nerve-grating annoyance and is where people write documents they don't want to write so that no-one will read them. The unofficial departmental wiki is much nicer.

For a non-geek audience, a lack of WYSIWYG is a real barrier to contribution, from the Wikimedia Foundation's usability surveys. Thankfully for geeks, a WYSIWYG editor that can cope with the horrifying guacamole that wikitext gets turned into on Wikipedia is a way off yet, so they're concentrating on skinning, the image pages, etc.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

''a lack of WYSIWYG is a real barrier to contribution''

Not half as much as, ''an unfounded belief that if they didn't fiddle with the format, it doesn't count''.

FCKEditor probably is the best thing ever for WYSIWYG within MW. It's just that you don't need to do that.

[reddragdiva]

I've just installed 1.16b2 (and spotted a really obvious installer bug - I'm wondering just how many people have bothered testing 1.16, and just how brown-bag it's going to be) and FCK.

It's a really horrible editor, like all rich text editors for wikitext. Urgh.

But I've pointed boss's boss (who asked about it) at it, and he'll throw it at the sales guys for a play. I'll see what the target audience of technophobes think of it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, you saw the Platforms website then.

"I need to update the docs on [mumble]"

"Sure. Point Frontpage at..."

"Would that be Frontpage-UX or Frontpage for Linux?"

"Ah."

The Sharepoint 'application servers' were worse.

I'm not surprised

[jendama.livejournal.com]

Most Brits aren't known for having golden skin -- most of y'all are quite fair.

[jendama.livejournal.com]

You have an LL Bean bag?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. I've had it for long enough (I think it'c circa mid 80s) that they don't make the things any more.