I had time between 1:1s today to solve a wiki problem that’s been nagging me. My codes, let me show you them.
Problem: We have meetings.
What’s worse, we persist in having them every week. Being the kind of project we are, we keep agendas and notes from those meetings publicly and invite the community to participate (does your browser? Great!)
What you want, then, is for each week’s meeting notes to link to next week’s and last week’s, like such:
And so, we do. But those links have to be hand-edited every week. Indeed, the pages for various meeting notes have earnest, heart-wrenching pleas in HTML comments, like
<!– REPLACE YYYY-MM-DD with the previous and next week’s year-month-date –>
No one should have to live like that.
Solution: ParserFunctions
Our mediawiki install includes the ParserFunctions extension, which has a whole bag of tricks. One of these tricks is {{#time}}. #time lets you produce various kinds of time/date strings, to wit:
{{#time: Y-m-d }}
Particularly nice, though, is that you can specify relative times, e.g.
{{#time: Y-m-d|+1 week}}
The relative syntax is so flexible, in fact, that I can utter this monstrosity:
[[Platform/{{#time: Y-m-d|tuesday last week}}|« previous week]]
to link to last week’s notes from a given page!
Still with me? Because there’s one snag left. The above works for people who have a static front page with this week’s info, and only ever want to link one week back. But those relative dates are relative to now — what if I want each link in the chain to link to the week prior?
No problem — our pages are named according to their dates, so just make the link relative to that, instead:
[[Platform/{{#time: Y-m-d | {{SUBPAGENAME}} -1 week}}|« previous week]]
Presto.
The things you learn while waiting for a phone call. If you want to get really exciting, you can do all this in transclusion tags, to have last week’s notes automatically added to this week, but that’s left as a terrifyingly-recursive exercise for the reader.
What’s your favourite mediawiki hack?
(PS – Full credit to Melissa for giving me the idea in the first place. I am naught but the implementor.)
Bugzilla is the devil we know. It’s more complicated than we’d like it to be (albeit mostly by our own hand), it’s pretty intimidating to new users (though I recognize the efforts to improve that), and adding the features we want can be a slog (I’m looking at you, multi-state flags).
22
Nov 10
First Impressions from China
When I got back from my recent trip to visit Mozilla Online in Beijing, I heard myself saying that often, but it’s very nearly a content-free statement. Of course China is different. A better, albeit clumsier, way to express things is:
The Chinese web is not the web we are used to.
“We” Mozilla, “We” the Western tech world, “We” the builders of the web. China is going about things differently, and they’re bringing more than a billion people online with them. The folks at Mozilla online understand this and were exceedingly patient and generous with their time helping me begin to do so as well.
Here’s one way of thinking about that difference: Continue reading →