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.)
I have always wanted an LCD Panel for my rear window in the car. It always seemed like it would be exceedingly handy to have the ability to fire off one of several pre-canned messages or, if I had a passenger, have some kind of keyboard where they could provide context-appropriate messaging for the cars around me. “Your turn signal is on.” “Your high beams are blinding me.” “That is a very big SUV, clearly you suck.” And so forth.
14
Sep 05
A Secret Passion
The smell of it, as I remove the shipping wrap is sharp. The paper smells freshly cut and printed. It is heavier than I remember.
I glide my fingers across the gloss of the cover, down the spine.
Like any good piece of literature, it is more than the sum of its parts. There are individual pages, individual passages which are artful, beautiful. But taken as a whole it transforms, it blends and mixes and unifies. It breathes. And it speaks. It speaks about a world of possibility and the search for substance over style. Of a lost generation’s yearning to understand what is real and good and pure – maybe of every generation’s need for that sense of solidity; of gritty, healthy profundity.
Of course I devour it. The anachronism, the self-contradiction, it does not engage, it compels. Every page makes you want to live up to it, to be worthy of what it offers. It would be difficult, and expensive, but you think about who you would be if you could really master and harness those forces. You would need no other god. You could literally reach out and grab the world and form it to your will and set it back and say “There. It is done. I have created. And I have done it with love, and with precision, and it is beautiful and it is real.”
The Lee Valley annual catalog is better than porn.