Sam Wilson's Website

PESOS again

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:19:29 +0000

It’s Friday night and I seem to be rebuilding my website in some sort of new experiment with indieweb PESOS ideas. Not sure this is sensible.

https://indieweb.org/PESOS

PSAS exhibition

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:23:51 +0000

Where to store the version number

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:37:00 +0000

It’s Wednesday morning, coffee is made, and SVG Translate is being upgraded to 2.0.0. I think that bumping major version numbers for underlying platform upgrades is slightly controversial, but I do it. My reasoning is that a major version primarily indicates that “something” must be done when you upgrade, and that’s definitely true when dropping support for old versions of PHP.

A few of the tools that use the ToolforgeBundle for Symfony display their current version number in the footer, and they do so by running git describe to get the current tag. This is proving to be silly when the filesystem is slow, and is timing out. It’d be better to have the current version number within the codebase somewhere — the trouble with that is remembering to keep it in sync. Ideally, I think, it’d be in a VERSION file, and would get updated every time a change is made so that there’s only ever one commit with a given version (other than -dev ones; i.e. the next commit after a release would add that).

P26706

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:14:13 +0000

The above post should be a sufficient way for me to post a ‘like’, but it’s not yet. If I sort out link previews it might be, but for now it’s a plain URL with nothing. If webmentions were working it would at least send one of them, but they’re not.

(Can I even say ‘above’ in a reply and know that the context is clear?)

P26705

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:13:33 +0000

https://dead.garden/blog/interactivity-of-personal-sites-and-webmentions.html

Blogs with stuff in the margins

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:30:14 +0000

modern web design trends have stripped away a lot of what made blogs interesting, discoverable, and accessible. Superficial minimalism has meant people don’t include archive links, metadata, blogrolls, or even RSS icons.

Ruben Schade’s blog is always interesting, and his post today about keeping tags, search, blogrolls, etc. visible on posts’ pages is on form.

The idea that the blog format was pretty much figured out in the early days satisfies me, but that’s probably just because I liked it at the time and am starting to feel more of that old “things were fine before and I never really finished figuring them out so do we really have to change already?!”

P26703

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 03:19:55 +0000

Having a good pair of headphones (Sennheiser 450 BT, currently) and a cup of coffee, in a quiet office, and without the summer heat baking the windows, is today making me happy. The ABC has a new(-ish) classical radio station, and the work I’ve been doing on SVG Translate is going well (or at least not breaking).

P26699

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 13:53:51 +0000

I seem to be borking around with my website. That’s the point of having a website though, isn’t it?

Entrance to the exhibition

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 07:38:04 +0000

The generator was to power the whole thing; the two doors (entrance and exit) are further along with scaffolding over each of them.

Satellite exhibition in the old woolstores

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 07:33:05 +0000

Loud sound and a row of revolving lights, set in the dark smoky interior of the old woolstores in Fremantle.

Vue in MediaWiki

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 06:50:14 +0000

I’ve been working on my first real foray into Vue in MediaWiki: a special page that lists all of the pages for which the current user has Edit Recovery data saved (T347673). It’s not something that really needs to use it at the moment (it’s just a simple list), but it’ll evolve soon and be more complicated and hopefully end up looking better.

Who knows, maybe I’ll learn more of this and get around to helping with moving all that old stuff away from jQuery UI? (The WikiEditor link-insertion dialog comes to mind, because I use that lots). Although I do wonder if I’m doing any of it right.

P26691

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 01:40:23 +0000

I’ve been writing mainly on my other sites (and other people’s sites, like wikis.world), and keep forgetting that I’ve got this site here. Probably no one reads it (or any of my other ones), and I guess that’s why I’ve been neglecting it.

WMAU added to the planet

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:53:24 +0000

Wikimedia Australia’s RSS feed is now included in Planet Wikimedia.

Get Blogging!

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 01:57:00 +0000

This is a good site to point people to when trying to explain why anyone should start a blog:

https://getblogging.org

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

Remember that your blog is yours! Your posts can contain exactly what you want them to: a sentence of text or a novel-length essay; photos and videos; audio; links and bookmarks. What you want to share is entirely up to you.

ORMs

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 09:50:08 +0000

I’ve got this weird little project that I’ve been working on a bit, and I keep trying to remove the ORM system. It’s not that ORMs are terrible, they’re not, they’re great sometimes. But when it comes down to it I just find it more annoying. I love looking at the database query report for any given page in the app, and knowing exactly what each is for and that each is useful. It’s just so easy to end up with lots of random look-up queries with an ORM set-up — it seems that it’s common to have a foreign key, and to not actually care about any of the attributes of the foreign record, but the ORM ends up querying for it. I don’t mean the whole “n+1 selects” problem, that’s annoying but not all that hard to avoid. It’s the extra queries that don’t really effect performance that bother me. I’d rather have a bit of a say over what’s run.

P26668

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 01:38:56 +0000

Oh oops, I created an Open Plaques plaque record, but thought I’d be able to edit its entry after saving — but I can’t! https://openplaques.org/plaques/58853

sfo2 → syd1

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 02:51:25 +0000

My websites are now all moved to Digital Ocean in Sydney. They were hosted in a few places overseas (mainly DO in California), and since DO opened their Sydney region I’ve been meaning to switch. It’s quite amazing how much quicker it is! So nice to type in a terminal with 50ms latency instead of 300.

Whenever I do this sort of thing I wonder if it’s worth carrying on with self-hosting. It takes a little bit of time, sometimes, although not really all that much. The main downside is just the feeling that I don’t really know enough. That said, I’ve been doing it since about 2006 and everything’s sort of gone according to plan in that time.

P26664

Fri, 19 May 2023 05:44:00 +0000

The Hackathon opening is starting in an hour. It looks like it’s going to be streamed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSb0PPVnelM #WMHack

Where Magpie's was

Fri, 05 May 2023 10:17:25 +0000

This used to be a lovely second hand bookshop.

P26661

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 09:00:19 +0000

Oh! It’s blasted VS Code. It goes “bibble” on some random syntax weirdnesses or something. Maybe it’s “wouble”.