Skip to main content

Starting once more

I have tried it many times before, but I guess you have to persist. I find blogging difficult. I often spend too long on writing it and don't post often enough. Twitter is more my thing, because it is just short blurps. Still lately I have found that Twitter is not enough. I have ideas and comments that I feel I need to write down in more than 140 characters and many of them have to do with Wikipedia. So I'll attempt it one more time. Topics will mostly be Wikipedia, online rights and software development, but other issues might come up. Welcome everyone.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

kAMDReceiveMessageError

We kept running into a kAMDReceiveMessageError in our company, when trying to install adHoc iPhone apps with the iPhone Configuration Utility for Windows. Everything was fine if people tried to install using Windows iTunes. After much time it was tracked to the addition of UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities to the Info.plist. For some very strange reason it seems that the Windows ICU doesn't like that property at all and fails to install any app that carries it. Not sure if this will affect AppStore submission, iTunes handles it and so does the Mac version of ICU it seems, but it is at the very least mildly annoying that testers can't install our application using Windows ICU.
Post a Comment
Read more

5 years of Article message boxes

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one....
1 comment
Read more

Template editor

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is finally making good progress on their template folding and template editor. Much of what the project has been doing with the edit screen has been in preparation of this work. The editor now folds complicated templates into a small block. One of the sandboxes the project uses now has the code deployed and it seems to be working quite well. Be aware that this is a development platform, and that browser peculiarities might not be fully dealt with yet. It is also NOT final. The wiki editor with folded templates. You can unfold the block, by clicking on the arrow to show the template code, or you can click the block and you are presented with a template editor that makes it easier to change the values of the template. This should be very helpful, because research showed that much of the trouble people had with editing Wikipedia, was the complex code on the edit pages. The template code is by far the most obscure and complicated code of all our wik...
3 comments
Read more