River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog

Send me your wiki-updating scripts!

river — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 05:11:56 +0000

Contribute to my list of resources for editing MediaWiki with code

Dealing with defaults

river — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:20:30 +0000

There are a lot of different things you can mean when you say “default parameter” in MediaWiki. This article explains them all.

How to install Sublime Text & Mediawiker

river — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 14:05:13 +0000

A step-by-step guide with screenshots on installing and configuring Sublime Text with the Mediawiker extension

If {{NAMESPACE}} do nothing, otherwise...

river — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:34:28 +0000

A common design pattern in MediaWiki templating is to write {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||}}

Book Review - The Field Guide to Global Payments

river — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 07:15:58 +0000

A review of “A Field Guide to Global Payments,” including a table of initialisms used in the book.

Ordering a Cargo field

river — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 18:02:20 +0000

How can you enforce a sorting order on a Cargo field when displaying tabular data?

ShareX image effects

river — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 16:40:47 +0000

How to use ShareX image effects & spam your friends with rainbows

How to use Weblate

river — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 02:34:59 +0000

A guide to using Weblate as a translator

How to use Dev Tools

river — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 20:52:47 +0000

Learn how to edit CSS interactively

Surfaces with pentominoes

river — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 01:18:07 +0000

Embedding a grid on a surface doesn’t really work, but we can approximate.

Serialization woes

river — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 06:29:07 +0000

My journey of encoding pentominoes on surfaces into permalinks

I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023

river — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:02:30 +0000

I attended EMWCon 2023 remotely again in 2023 and finally gave the presentation everyone has been waiting for: I don’t like infoboxes.

List-type fields, for realsies

river — Sat, 20 May 2023 23:06:27 +0000

What are list-type fields? What aren’t they? How do I query them?

Mediawiker 3.6.14

river — Sat, 20 May 2023 06:25:55 +0000

SublimeText extension Mediawiker 3.6.14 release update, plus some bonuses

Book review - Everybody Writes

river — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:31:15 +0000

“Everybody Writes” was deeply disappointing to me because it wasn’t the book I wanted to read. That said, I think it can be a valuable resource for people who want an introductory and accessible writing book.

How I found four marketing books

river — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 02:08:55 +0000

Subtitle: I dropped my keys - no, I mean bouncy balls - no, I mean information - in the light and learned to stop looking for it in the dark: An information-seeking parable

Paste a transparent-background image with PIL

river — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 19:20:21 +0000

How to paste a transparent-background image file over another file using PIL, or WTF is a mask and how does it work?

Fandom update

river — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:08:07 +0000

An update on my time with Leaguepedia.

Book review - Recoding Gender

river — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:54:30 +0000

A review of the book “Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing”

Lua Branches

river — Tue, 31 May 2022 10:05:34 +0000

Lua Branches is a prototype/proof-of-concept MediaWiki extension for making branches of Lua modules & their dependency chains.

Live I18n

river — Tue, 17 May 2022 01:52:39 +0000

I wrote my second-ever MediaWiki extension!

Handling internal data in MediaWiki

river — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 05:27:42 +0000

My EMWCon 2022 talk

How to crosslink two Hugo blogs

river — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 04:50:12 +0000

My misadventures accomplishing what should have been a really easy task in Hugo

CustomLogs 1.0

river — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 04:50:09 +0000

Custom Logs 1.0 has been released!

Lua table errors

river — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 06:28:24 +0000

A framework for inserting Lua errors into HTML tables using a singleton class

Toggleable columns

river — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 22:07:12 +0000

A simple interface to automatically let users toggle columns in any data table on the entire wiki.

Serving Hugo from a non-root location with Nginx

river — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 02:29:20 +0000

How to host a Hugo blog from a non-root location

Organize your Hugo content folder by year, without affecting any URLs

river — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 04:18:45 +0000

How to organize your Hugo content folder into subfolders by year without affecting any URLs

Book review - Foundations of Library and Information Science

river — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 08:20:41 +0000

A review of “Foundations of Library and Information Science”

How to find a namespace number

river — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:28:29 +0000

Here’s how you can find the number of a particular namespace

Make lots of sandbox pages

river — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 23:41:34 +0000

Instead of putting all of your code experiments on a single page, make lots of little sandbox pages!

How to set up Sphinx for Read the Docs

river — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:54:37 +0000

A tutorial for configuring Sphinx for Read the Docs for your Python projects

mwcleric, my Python MediaWiki client library

river — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 06:21:26 +0000

An overview of mwcleric

Book review - The Elements of User Experience

river — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:17:38 +0000

A review of “The Elements of User Experience”

Mouse Gestures (the useful ones)

river — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 05:06:54 +0000

My Gesturefy bindings in Firefox and how I use them when working with MediaWiki

Book review - Free to All

river — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 04:26:12 +0000

A review and chapter summaries of “Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920”

I stored a boolean instead of a timestamp

river — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 01:16:32 +0000

A Cargo field I was going to store as a timestamp but decided to store as a boolean instead

Book review - Celebration, U.S.A.

river — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:49:11 +0000

A review of “Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town”

Book review - Library as Place

river — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:07:18 +0000

A review of “The Library as Place: History, Community, and Culture”

MediaWiki hotkeys (the useful ones)

river — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:15:21 +0000

A list of just the useful hotkeys/access keys in MediaWiki

Book review & notes - Looking for Information

river — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 20:33:43 +0000

A review of, including chapter-by-chapter notes on, “Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior”

Book review - Strategic Writing for UX

river — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 03:50:07 +0000

A review of “Strategic Writing for UX”

Gadget - Copy search results

river — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 13:33:46 +0000

Similar to the copy category members gadget, but for search results - and more!

Book review - Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings

river — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 05:44:26 +0000

A review of “Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings, Fifth Edition”

Bracket zoom bug

river — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 21:16:24 +0000

A quick CSS bugfix that was particularly satisfying - and interesting!

Windows update made my mouse stop working

river — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 09:14:00 +0000

Windows update made my mouse stop working. It turned out to be a problem with my USB ports.

Gadget - Copy category members

river — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:13:09 +0000

A gadget to copy all members of a category

Frame, wtf?

river — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:46:02 +0000

Frame objects in Scribunto can be confusing, and they do a lot of work. Normally I say “don’t worry, just copy the copyable code,” but here’s an indepth guide to everything they do.

Book notes - OSTEP (part 3)

river — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 05:16:48 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 3, Persistence

Book notes - OSTEP (part 2)

river — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 11:07:21 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 2, Concurrency

Book notes - OSTEP (part 1)

river — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 22:50:55 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 1, Virtualization

Book review - Microcopy

river — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:08:32 +0000

A review of “Microcopy: The Complete Guide”

Gadget - Top-of-page categories

river — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:27:26 +0000

A gadget to show categories at the top of pages

Bookmarklet - stay here

river — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:38:23 +0000

A bookmarklet that enables a prompt before navigating away from your current location

Comment your closing braces

river — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:22:52 +0000

This one trick will save you 80% of your wikitext debugging time!

Optimizing Cargo - query 3

river — Tue, 25 May 2021 22:07:05 +0000

The final of three Cargo queries I recently optimized on Leaguepedia

Book review - Developing Quality Technical Information

river — Sat, 22 May 2021 09:37:18 +0000

A review of the book “Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors”

Sublime Text 4 is released!

river — Thu, 20 May 2021 03:46:13 +0000

Sublime Text 4 has been released!

My EMWCon 2021 talk

river — Thu, 13 May 2021 03:52:11 +0000

At EMWCon 2021, I gave a talk about easily performing tasks with Python on MediaWiki wikis.

Optimizing Cargo - query 2

river — Tue, 04 May 2021 22:06:58 +0000

The second of three Cargo queries I recently optimized.

Optimizing Cargo - query 1

river — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 02:05:43 +0000

A Cargo query I optimized recently on Leaguepedia

mwparserfromhell 0.6

river — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 01:15:08 +0000

mwparserfromhell released version 0.6 a couple months ago with a couple really exciting changes!

A Lua module to print all args

river — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 11:24:05 +0000

How to write a module to print all args to help with debugging Cargo

Tournament brackets (part 1)

river — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 06:36:44 +0000

Our CSS-grid-powered tournament brackets on Leaguepedia

Setting common match & game keys

river — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 02:33:50 +0000

How I corrected a mistake in my Cargo database design

Reinstalling Windows

river — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 08:46:12 +0000

I reinstalled Windows this month. As usual, it was a pretty arduous process, so let’s document what I did to make it suck less next time!

Use cases for Extension:CustomLogs

river — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 02:33:50 +0000

Use cases for my extension CustomLogs

Escape item["id"]

river — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:59:37 +0000

A funny commit I made today

Gadget - Improving Special:ListGroupRights CSS

river — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:43:00 +0000

A couple lines of CSS to improve the user experience of Special:ListGroupRights

Books I read in 2019

river — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:59:57 +0000

A list of books I read in 2019

Books I read in 2020

river — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 22:18:30 +0000

A list of books I read in 2020

Firefox, keep bookmark keywords

river — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 07:08:07 +0000

Firefox is considering removing bookmark keywords. They should keep them.

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.