2020 on River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog

Non-unique item names

river — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 21:23:05 +0000

In a recent patch, Riot introduced non-unique item names, and we had to create a system for dealing with this.

Gadget - Line numbers in modules

river — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 23:58:32 +0000

I add line numbers to Lua modules with JS & CSS.

Example wiki scripts

river — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 07:21:36 +0000

Introducing a new repo containing example Python wiki scripts I write

Gadget - Cargo pagevalues improvement

river — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 20:51:23 +0000

An improvement to the Cargo pagevalues view using just JS & CSS.

Gadget - Search results new page hotkey

river — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 05:03:04 +0000

Let’s make a gadget so that Alt+Shift+E creates a new page from the Special:Search screen when a page doesn’t exist!

Gadget - Disable Display Title

river — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 06:07:53 +0000

A small JS gadget to disable display title for wiki editors

Multi-Instance Subtemplates in Lua

river — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 04:44:14 +0000

We can serialize arguments from multi-instance subtemplates when working with Lua and retrieve our data in easy-to-work-with arrays using simple wrapper functions.

Top Schedule

river — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 13:25:44 +0000

How I created a global site banner on Leaguepedia using the extension Header Footer and some JavaScript, but no api calls

Run Pywikibot in Windows Subsystem for Linux

river — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 07:48:29 +0000

How to configure PWB for third-party wikis, specifically in Windows Subsystem for Linux

Your URL bar is a CLI

river — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 02:32:49 +0000

When working with wikis, you can use your URL bar as a CLI-like interface for navigation, making your life a lot easier and more efficient!

CompoundRole

river — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 16:50:18 +0000

A bunch of things I did wrong because learning is fun!

How to rename Cargo tables safely

river — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 01:08:14 +0000

Cargo actually provides a way to cleanly rename tables without any “downtime,” but it’s not obvious or documented how to do this.

Bot passwords & you (& your bot (& you))

river — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:43:18 +0000

What’s a bot password? What’s the difference between bot accounts and bot passwords? Why do I need all this anyway?

Don't use _pageName

river — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:05:06 +0000

Sometimes it can seem convenient to use the built-in _pageName field that Cargo provides; however, _pageName is a metadata field, and you should take care to use it only as such.

Die, DisplayPort!

river — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 16:28:17 +0000

DisplayPort sucks in a multi-monitor setup and I’m celebrating not using it anymore.

Serving Flask from a non-root location with Nginx

river — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:38:13 +0000

I couldn’t find much documentation on how to serve Flask with uWSGI and Nginx from a non-root location, so, here’s some.

Vscode 2

river — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 20:15:29 +0000

In which I report a bug and discover I have to write an extension, sigh

A new-tab-in-container Firefox hotkey

river — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:09:08 +0000

A new AutoHotKey mini-adventure, in which I want a hotkey to create a new tab in a specific container, but here there be dragons!

Use cases for Highlight Links in Category

river — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:21:53 +0000

Highlight Links In Category is a very small MediaWiki extension that applies classes to links based on the links’ targets’ categories. It has a number of incredibly nice use cases; here I give some examples.

Adventures in caching primary keys

river — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 20:39:18 +0000

The pattern of store -> query -> store -> query can lead to caching nightmares when working with Cargo or SMW in MediaWiki. This is the story of how I dealt with one.

Popups

river — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 20:21:07 +0000

Popup content can offer users a wide range of dynamic content options on a page - and lazily-loading popup content can do this without increasing loading times. Here’s how I’ve built a framework for both static and lazily-loaded popups.

VSCode 1

river — Tue, 26 May 2020 06:23:13 +0000

Last week I installed VSCode for the first time, after using exclusively SublimeText for about two years (and Notepad++ prior to that). I’m going to document my learning curve.

Highlighting disambiguations

river — Tue, 19 May 2020 13:21:48 +0000

Disambiguations are typically somewhat user-unfriendly, especially when a wiki has a relatively low percentage of pages that are disambiguated and so the presence of one is unexpected. Here I describe my method for improving quality of life when disambiguation links do appear.

CharInsert: Why you should "char"

river — Tue, 05 May 2020 04:46:37 +0000

CharInsert is one of my favorite extensions. Here’s how I made a Lua wrapper for it to create a user-friendly interface for anyone to add snippets they want.

Sublimetext for Mediawiki

river — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 07:03:23 +0000

The “Mediawiker” plugin makes Sublime the best IDE-like experience for editing wikis, particularly when one is primarily writing Scribunto/Lua modules. Here’s how I’ve set up my environment.

My EMWCon 2020 Talks

river — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:43:52 +0000

At EMWCon 2020, I gave one talk and hosted two Create Camp sessions, discussing different aspects of usage of Cargo and Lua in MediaWiki.

The Anti-Thanos Snap That Wasn't

river — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 01:08:42 +0000

The story of the April Fools Day joke for 2020 that I didn’t do, and the “Snap” that we may or may not still do.

Gadgets for code organization

river — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 01:20:40 +0000

Though it’s mostly used as a way to let wikis have opt-in or opt-out CSS and JS features for users, the Gadgets extension is a great way to organize code instead of using Common.css and Common.js for everything.

Lua Hooks System

river — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 10:44:27 +0000

A system of hooks in Scribunto can be reasonable to use if you have a wikifarm with synced code that occasionally needs to be slightly modified on one or more wikis. I found the system more complicated than it was worth, but I’m documenting it here before I remove it.

Setting up a global hotkey to mute-unmute a Firefox stream

river — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 01:50:20 +0000

How to set up a global hotkey to toggle mute a tab of Firefox (for example a Twitch stream) using AutoHotKey

Using the Mediawiki API without coding

river — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 04:22:03 +0000

Using the MediaWiki API doesn’t require coding. The on-wiki GUI provided at Special:ApiSandbox allows you to familiarize yourself with available actions, test queries, and run simple batch jobs without writing a single line of code!

Determining team members from roster change data: A Leaguepedia case study

river — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 23:55:49 +0000

Managing complexity using Cargo with MediaWiki to track League of Legends esports roster changes.

Fixing autocomplete in Sublimetext Markdown syntax

river — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 05:05:25 +0000

How to disable autocompletion in SublimeText markdown syntax

How to add Cargo docstrings on table pages

river — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 04:16:35 +0000

This is not a post about how to add Cargo docstrings on table pages. Rather, it’s a post about how to create workarounds in MediaWiki in a reasonably well-controlled manner.

New Roster Changes

river — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 18:03:16 +0000

An overview of the process I used to create our single-source-of-truth roster change database tables on Leaguepedia. This post originally was created as a user page on Leaguepedia.