New Look

I spent the evening knocking down the cobwebs and dusting off the baseboards, but started with something unrelated to this site. I had another WordPress site that I decided to take down, so I archived some of the content then deleted the WordPress installation.

Returning to this site, I saw a warning about the php version, so I updated that from 7.4 to 8.3. My hosting provider regularly updates WordPress, along with its plugins and themes, but not the PHP version. I made a backup first, but didn’t notice any issues after the update. I also made some other minor changes that were recommended, and deleted some old files. One recommendation was to remove unused themes, which got me to look at what I had installed and pick something new.

Next I turned to the blog contents, cleaning up some of the tags and categories. There is probably more work to do on that front, but it’s tidy enough that I can start to look forward.

Did you miss me?

I don’t exactly have the greatest track record for posting here, but I have had thoughts recently that need an outlet. When I looked for a place to share them I realized how neglected this place was. Let me see what I can do…

My New Online Home

Well, my web sites have a new home.  I haven’t purged all of my content from Dreamhost yet, but I moved my domain registrations and changed the name servers so everything is being served from StableHost.  For the WordPress content, instead of copying the files (along with themes, plugins, and images) I did a clean install.  I exported the posts and comments from the old sites before changing DNS, then imported them into the new installation.  I have re-added most of the images on this site, but there is still some cleanup to do.

Leaving Dreamhost

Since April 2002, I have had an online home at DreamHost.  I don’t want to leave, but in less than a month they are disabling catch-all email addresses, and that is a feature I can’t live without.

I have spent the past few days searching for a new place to host email and personal sites, but let me tell you – it is not a fun process.  When I started here 16 years ago, I don’t remember having so many choices.  GoDaddy was the cheap place to register domains, but if they offered hosting it was not attractive.  DreamHost was a relatively new company using open source software and a custom control panel.  I started with a package that cost $20/mo, but in 2005 I switched to a package and payment plan that worked out to $8/mo.  I think that’s about the time that I brought the family on board, hosting a family-name domain that I could share with my brothers.

Today, there are hundreds (or thousands?) of web hosting companies.  There is one company (Endurance International Group) that operates over 100 different hosting brands/companies.  There are sites that pose as review lists (like these) that promote only EIG brands, and sites that warn against hosting with EIG.  There are even (hopefully objective) review sites that give reliability and performance statistics for some prominent hosting providers. PC Mag and cnet have their own lists, but both of them get affiliate kickbacks that may affect their ratings.

But then I start poking around on IsItDownRightNow, and I find conflicting reports about reliability and I wonder if the Pingdom stats (like this one for DreamHost) are telling the whole story.  I need to do more research, but I’m running out of time.

Java hosting

Most of my sites are running on dreamhost. They’re pretty good for sites running Python, Ruby, or PHP, but they don’t support server-side Java.

Over the years, I have searched for Java application hosting to fill that void. I was mostly looking for a place to explore and try new things, so I wasn’t willing to pay much. The inexpensive ones I found usually had very low RAM, and sometimes shared JVMs between users. To get a private JVM capable of running a decent app server usually cost more per month than I was willing to spend, and often required a dedicated server or VPS, which was more of a time commitment than I wanted. Eventually, I stopped looking.

At some point Google came along with their App Engine. It allowed part of what I was seeking, but came with its own limitations.

Today I discovered OpenShift, though it appears to have been started two years ago (May 2011). In additioon to Java, it supports a handful of other languages, as well as an assortment of frameworks and databases. It has a free version that is limited, but even the free version appears to support JBoss and MySQL!

Mobile Wiki Skin

The next step in reviving my wiki was to make it accesible on my iPhone.  A quick trip through Google, and I found an answer on Stack Overflow. I installed the extension and the skin, and it worked – for the most part.  It did format the content nicely, but I saw the following error at the top of the page.

I haven’t done much with MediaWiki skins, but was hoping it wouldn’t be too hard to fix. So I searched my MediaWiki skins directory for the problematic function, and the following lines stood out:

$ grep -ir initPage skins
skins/Vector.php: public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) {
skins/Vector.php: parent::initPage( $out );
skins/WPtouch.php: function initPage( &$out ) {
skins/WPtouch.php: SkinTemplate::initPage( $out );

I changed WPtouch.php to make it consistent with Vector.php, and the error went away. Following is a diff of the before (top) & after:

21,22c21,22
< function initPage( &$out ) {
< SkinTemplate::initPage( $out );
---
> public function initPage( OutputPage $out ) {
> parent::initPage( $out );

I also changed the Display_Actions flag, to enable mobile edits (among other things).  It worked, but the Portrait mode needs a little tweaking:

Portrait:

Landscape:

It’s not pretty, but it seems to work fine in landscape mode, so I’ll leave it alone for now.  If you’re on a mobile device, you can see it here: datguy.net/wiki

EDIT: I thought that there might be a newer version of the skin.  The Stack Overflow answer links to a 2010 page, but the mediawiki gallery links to a 2012 update.  I examined the download links and they seem to be the same.

Also, after posting my solution I got a reply from someone that had the same problem, and his solution to the “Actions” problem in portrait mode was to change the “Personal tools” text.  I changed mine to “My tools” (in ./languages/messages/MessagesEn.php), and that was enough to prevent Actions from wrapping onto the second line.

EDIT: In the years since I posted this, I have reinstalled MediaWiki without reapplying the changes above.

It’s alive!

I recently brought my wiki back to life at wiki.datguy.net datguy.net/wiki, consolidating my old wikis onto a newly upgraded MediaWiki installation.  After I went through and removed a lot of dead links, I decided it was time to work on the configuration.  The first thing that had to go was the default URL structure (i.e. http://wiki.datguy.net/index.php?title=Main_Page).  I was hoping to simplify it to http://wiki.datguy.net/Main_Page.

I found a page at mediawiki.org describing how to shorten the URL, but it recommended against page names in the root directory, with a link to a warning page.  As much as I want to have pages directly in the root, I didn’t want to deal with the complications yet – so I picked a random letter to use as a virtual directory, resulting in http://wiki.datguy.net/w/Main_Page.

EDIT

That extra virtual directory kept bugging me, so I moved the MediaWiki installation out of wiki.datguy.net into a directory underneath datguy.net, where I could use the /wiki path.  I changed the old domain to redirect to the new location — http://wiki.datguy.net/Main_Page redirects to http://datguy.net/wiki/Main_Page.  However, the wiki subdomain still has the problem that they recommend against — http://wiki.datguy.net/robots.txt is redirected as if it is a regular page, and displays an error when http://datguy.net/wiki/Robots.txt is not found.

Writely test

This was entered as a Writely document (now part of Google Docs), to test Writely’s ability to post to my blog.

It can! However, the following features don’t work right:

  • it can’t unpublish the entry
  • posting updates adds an entry instead of updating the original one
  • when I finish editing this document, then edit again, it doesn’t seem to know that it’s been posted to the blog. It would be nice if it kept that history (which would probably require fixing the previous two problems).

The entries themselves have some problems:

  • no title
  • they are not tagged (they default to the General tag, instead of picking up the tag I assigned on Writely)
  • the “comment” link (under the entry) and the “view” link (on the admin pages) don’t work. The relative url of the entry was /2006/08/30//. There should be an entry name between the last two slashes…

In summary, Writely might be a nice editor to use in place of the built-in blog editor, if these problems are fixed…

Wacky Wiki

I have a much longer post in the works (mentally) on a related topic, but I had to get this thought out…

One of the main things I look for in the software that will run my web sites is something that (once installed) I can completely manage through the browser. I’ll accept that software upgrades may require working at the command line, but if I want to change content or layout, don’t make me edit files or muck around in the code.

For that reason, I think my use of MediaWiki may come to an end. I need to check out the new version (I’m using 1.4.x, and 1.5.4 is available), but from what I’ve seen in the few configuration changes I’ve made, I can’t imagine it being satisfactorily improved in the new version. The latest frustration point (changing the contents of the navigation sidebar) has been fixed in 1.5, so we’ll see…