are amazing. Seriously. I’ve been with them two weeks yesterday and I’m astonished.
Maybe because I’ve got used to 1&1 taking up to a week to respond to a simple query that was in their FAQ (the quickest response I’ve had is two days), but HostGator are incredible. I’ve had answers within minutes, and a few hours at most. Well done guys!
Today Xinki Learn went live. This is an installation of Moodle, the open-source course management system. The idea is short courses can be created on anything people request. The first course is for administrators of MediaWiki sites who are not involved with the actual server administration of the site - volunteers, mainly.
We use Moodle in school and I’m interested in administering it, so it’s a learning experience for me too. We’ll see how it goes!
Feel free to join the first course, “Using MediaWiki”. The enrolment key is JIMBO.
Old news now yes, but I was in France yesterday and have been busy with Xinki the rest of the week so I thought I’d blog about it.
I visited the site as I was curious. What did I get? An error page. Then I accessed the site proper, and saw warnings about re-trying if I got errors, and lots of red links on the main page. Not good…
I checked out the new user log to see who was on this thing. Account creation is disabled; you have to request an account be created for you, with your username being your real name.
I then visited Special:Version. It said “MediaWiki 1.10 (modified)”, whatever modified means on an as-yet unreleased version of MediaWiki, and that they were using PostgreSQL as their database.
Will Citizendium be around in a years’ time? It’s hard to gauge. Back in 2001, nobody knew if Wikipedia was going to be successful. Here we are six years and over 1.7 million articles later. So who knows? Comments please!
The move to HostGator is complete. Kunden was taken offline on Tuesday, and Xinki is running exclusively on Gerard. Waggishmab.org.uk too is online, with WaggishBLOG installed.
Good news: Emma Watson and Rupert Grint have confirmed they’ll reprise their roles in the Harry Potter film adaptations for the last two films. There had been speculation that Emma - the only one of the trio for which Potter constitutes her only role so far - wanted to quit. These rumours were dispelled today as producers announced both her and Rupert had signed to do H-B P and Deathly Hallows.
Radcliffe, who plays Potter, signed up earlier in March. While I still feel he isn’t a great actor, it would be odd to have someone else play him, after the first four adaptations, so I suppose I’m pleased about him as well…
In February, the BBC reported that after Apple Corps (the Beatles’ record label) and Apple, Inc (formerly Apple Computer) reached an agreement over trademarks or something like that, it would shortly be possible to download the group’s back catalogue online using download sites such as Napster or the iTunes Store.
A UK download site called Wippit announced on Friday that they would be the first site to allow fans to legally download the music. EMI, Apple Corp’s parent record label came out today and said it ain’t happening - yet. The article does however, say “EMI is believed to be on the verge of releasing The Beatles’ back catalogue as digital downloads”.
Wikipedia’s volunteer UK press contact David Gerard was on BBC Radio 2 last Tuesday Thursday discussing Wikipedia. The phone call with Chris Evans live on air lasted around five minutes. David put in a good plug for much-needed cash after Chris asked whether, “like the BBC, Wikipedia would be free-to-air forever”. David also gave a brief history of Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, prompted by Chris saying “He’s in China today, or…somewhere?”. I think it was Japan actually, but yeah. Good job! As they say, all publicity is good publicity.
He sounded really Australian on the radio. Yes David, I know you are Australian, but it sounded much more pronounced than when I heard you speak at the January London meetup - just an observation! (That’s a good thing 
)
Update: Sorry, Thursday - not Tuesday!
Today’s (obviously…) Mail on Sunday - the tabloid that thinks it’s a broadsheet here in the UK - has an article on its website where four moderately well-known faces comment on Wikipedia. It’s a mixed bunch, with Edwina Currie declaring it rubbish and directing fans to her own site, complete with malformed domain name, to others taking the widely-accepted view that, as a wiki and a top-10 website, there are always going to be errors, but our volunteer editors try our utmost to quickly weed them out.
Of course, this being the MoS, there are errors - I wish we could weed them out! For example, Essjay’s supposed 20,000 edits - I think you’ll find it was 16,650, as I told Catherine Elsworth of The Daily Telegraph last week and she quickly updated it.
Read it yourselves
What was up with the music on the first show of Millionaire’s new series? It sounded normal but parts including the Ask the Audience music went funny, like a guitar being tuned (any instrument I guess; I only know what a guitar being tuned sounds like). Anyway, I hope it was just that particular show because it was awful and I hated it.
Xinki Photos, the Coppermine photo gallery on Xinki, now appears in Google search results. This blog, as well as Waggishmab’s also appears on Technorati. All good