Talk:Main Page

From Ganfyd

This project arose out a discussion on DNUK [1] in November 2005

Elements of its antecedents include discussions on GP-UK in 2001,
and of course The Wikipedia

Archives of this main talk page at:-

Site Visits

Site visits per day have settled. Increased activity mainly seems to be related to a search engine such as google ranking a page in its top few links. We have had three periods off line in 3 years.Mlj 11:34, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Uploading media files

Can we? Trying to upload a recording of doppler signals. Mark ong 17:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

In principle this is easy as all you have to do is to redefine in LocalSettings.php the variables $wgEnableUploads to true, $wgFileBlacklist, $wgStrictFileExtensions etc correctly and $wgFileExtensions = array(); to include files with the ending of your audio files, say'mp3' if you do not want warnings.

In practice it requires one of the few of us that have root write privileges (this does not include me) to do it, and since no-one who can do it has got around to my request for the GANFYD favicon.ico to be placed in the right place who knows when it would be done. Certainly any file format enabled for upload should be a safe one that is unlikely to be used for malware purposes (on a windows machine) and that most browsers/OS will recognise easily. I would bow to Adrian's knowledge of what is safe, but know that at present it sure does not include *.pdf, *.ppt and *.exe if you are one of those Windows users out there! Mlj 21:04, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

I shall do it, and the favicon.ico thing as soon as I can. I have had a catastrophic laptop crash, which has left me without the keys to the door. I'm trying to get hold of Rupert as he has the info, and then I'll do it. Next week sometime. Remind me! (And yes, I did have things written down in a secure place, but it is so secure as to have been inadvertantly shredded a while ago. Mea culpa.) --A.l.brown 19:55, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I'll get on it. The favicon is oddly difficult though... Midgley 00:38, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

mp3 files seem okay. Mark ong 19:00, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

suprised that Adrian had a problem with favicon as it seemed so trivial to correct by a copy but I did not have root write access needed to drop it in right place created by Rupert when I tried to solve problem a long time ago now. I suspect Apache then requires a restart and I seem to remember this is more complicated ! Over to Adrian whatever. I must test the svg upload functionality sometime as it could offer some extras to users not stuck on IE Mlj 17:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

It is odd. I can do a reload/restart for Apache. The Practice has settled down and I have a bit more time now. Midgley 10:21, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Birthday

Our First Birthday Cake courtesy of Mark ong

Happy birthday ganfyd

Scripts or Bots

I don't know enough about wikimedia scripts or bots, but it struck me that there must be an automated way of cataloging images, i.e. creating a script that adds [[Category: Molecular images]] to any image file containing 'Molecule'.

In addition, Category:Medical instruments could be better named 'medical equipment', but it's too much hassle to do it manually. Similarl, Category:General practice and Category:General Practice need merging and an automated way would be helpful. Anybody know more about scripts/bots? Mark ong 02:13, 8 September 2008 (BST)

There are bots out there that can automate this sort of thing. It has been a while since I looked into them, but I reckon we should investigate. It may be that Adrian can write something using Python to do much of what is needed...? --A.l.brown 16:08, 8 September 2008 (BST)

Actually I spent about 30 min last night reading up on bots on mediawiki having decided that the principle of manual update was fine but the application sucked !. Came to the conclusion I could probably write one based on a template out there and then found when I converted the BASE64 file declared as opensource the author was lying - there were binary bits. Presently no time to do this from a standing start and more importantly debug. What I would have done was write a PHP routine that detected image files that contained the string xMolecule.yyy and also categorised those that read x.zzz as Category:Molecular structures. Mlj 22:26, 8 September 2008 (BST)

CC Licence work may be interesting

The CC foundation are trying to establish consensus on how "non-commercial" use is defined. http://ostatic.com/blog/creative-commons-asks-how-you-define-non-commercial Midgley 16:49, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Upgrade to 1.13 finished.

The upgrade is finished. So far it's gone very smoothly - it was read only for a couple of hours while the update script added columns to tables, but the switch from 1.9.3 to 1.13.3 was graceful and instantaneous. I would be interested to know if all extensions are tickety boo. —Rupert (Talk) 14:54, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Current events gone away? Midgley 12:04, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. However fixing it way I did it deliberately moves current events page contents from a default search. Others might not like this. Comments welcome. Obviously we could just redirect to main name space which I suspect was how we did it before but it seemed not that elegant. It might be possible to edit MediaWiki:Sidebar to point to main namespace page of same name instead of GANFYD namespace without a redirect, but then we might find issue reoccurring with another upgrade. I think the MediaWiki namespace pages changed with the upgrade which makes some sense as I did have a bit of work to do there after the upgrade. Mlj 18:42, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Seems a bug in user name log in exists that is quite exotic but would be explained if MediaWikis input validation algorithms have changed. I have started preliminary investigation with user:Ciaran who may not be now locked out if the blocking of a probably unused user name Ciarán works and we don't need to modify the raw database. Mlj 22:54, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to revisit the issue of the ganfyd registration engine. I think it is probably due for a rewrite, along with the admin tools. --A.l.brown 23:29, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry what's the problem - Ciaran can't log-in? —Rupert (Talk) 09:27, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes he thinks he changed his user prefs to skins on preferences to 'CologneBlue' and this is causing error message

Fatal error: Access level to SkinCologneBlue::$searchboxes must be protected (as in class Skin) or weaker in /home/wikis/ganfyd-permanent/skins/CologneBlue.php on line 312 Do you have the ability to reset his user prefs to default and see if that resolve=s the issue ? 22:56, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Cite

I have updated Help:Citations to explain how Cite extension needs explicate identification by the name property of dublicate references on a page. A pain and will really justify a bot to sort out historical pages. Rupert's old automatic detection of dublicates was much more elegant in references.php Mlj 17:04, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Time

I was checking my entry on Public Guardian and noticed that it was entered at 10.28. My onscreen and living room clocks noted that it was 11.32. The clocks have changed at the weekend. Does it matter if the website runs on GMT or BST? Should this be stated? Or have I just been staring blankly at the screen for over an hour - not impossible I suppose :¬( --Tom 10:52, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually Tom as long as you have editor rights it becomes clear when you sign and date an entry with 4 tithes that the site uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) instead of BST unless you have changed your default personal preferences in the Date and Time tag of the My Preferences options. I suspect any one with editor rights once logged in and who has set their timezone offset right will get the right time displayed on their editorial work for them, but have not tried this myself :) Mlj 21:50, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

The time is stored as ticks since epoch (seconds since a moment in 1970) so the displayed time only matters if someone starts arguing, and then we'd go to the stored Unix datetime. Midgley 13:25, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Open Source textbooks good standard in California

We should find this slightly interesting. http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/13/1450220/Open-Textbooks-Win-Over-Publishers-In-CA?art_pos=1 Midgley 17:24, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Are we notable?

The ganfyd article in Wikipedia has been listed for deletion as non-notable. I suspect we are more notable and noted than many articles in WP, but there are guidelines on what notability is. Midgley 22:15, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I've given up trying to understand how Wikipedia's policies work.--A.l.brown 09:31, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there is a consistent policy , just someone who likes their power to distort free information which was a reason I got out of wikipedia medical articlesMlj

I see its just been marked no consensus with debate closed but the marker for consideration for deletion has not been removed as yet. Mlj 09:11, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Still there, I see... --Penglish 00:10, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, we were offically kept on 19th October 2009. Mlj 11:24, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

News from Rupert

Hi everyone. I've been boycotting DNUK since about two years ago, and somehow I've got out of the habit of coming on ganfyd too. Sorry for not doing anything since January. :$ I note the discussion above about uploading other media types-I'll have a quick look at that tomorrow. (I'm on SSA, or Student Selected Activity, at home atm.) Generally speaking, things are going well - I'm a final year now, currently filling in my job application form and looking forward to the first half of my finals in the second week of November!) Isn't ganfyd's birthday around then? —Rupert (Talk) 21:53, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

short of space in /var

I need to do some fairly major moving around. Midgley 00:01, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for getting it back up. One minor issue (we hope) is that the GANFYD server is being targetted something heavy from South East Asian web addresses. Favicon is now working. Mlj 09:46, 21 March 2010 (UTC)