I suppose this is a kind of look back on the last three months of Xinki. We’ve moved hosts and have launched a number of new sites. Xinki Photos, the free photo gallery, is the most popular amongst friends and casual visitors. We’re getting moderate traffic from various places on the web, which is obviously good.
I’m on a wikibreak at the moment. On Thursday I blanked my Wikipedia userpage, adding {{wikibreak}}.
I need to temporarily abandon my day-to-day Wikipedia editing until my exams are over. It would probably be best if I unsubscribed from wikiEN-l and foundation-l, not to mention MediaWiki-l, but I don’t want the messages in my Gmail disrupted - I’ll just try to ignore most messages, maybe look through at weekends for the next ~month.
I’ll not be doing too much with Xinki either.
As for my The Apprentice proposal, well - I’ve sent it to the relevant person and it’s up to him to let me know.
A second release candidate of MediaWiki 1.1.0.0 is now available. It’s currently running at sweet-technology.co.uk for testing purposes. The previous release, rc1, is running at garykirk.org.uk.
The final version of MediaWiki 1.10.0 should be released within the next week or two at the latest, I imagine.
The Xinki project experienced minor vandalbot linkspam edits on several wikis over the last few days. This blog, as I have said before, gets many spam comments which are blocked by Akismet.
Until now, no anti-spam measures were in place on any of the wikis hosted by Xinki.
On Thursday (yesterday when I write this) the first spam edits were seen at the newly-installed pre-production stage Sweet Technology encyclopaedia wiki. The SpamBlacklist extension at mediawiki.org was installed and activated, but it is not known if it is functioning correctly as yet.
This morning similar spam was seen at the Xinki Lab and on the main Xinki Wiki, and consequently the ConfirmEdit extension was installed on all Xinki-hosted wikis as an emergency measure, going live at 14:30 GMT.
A new Xinki site has launched. CGSB News is a kind of portal for CGSB news, views and content. I’ll advertise it about and see what happens…
I’m going to be reviewing a book in the next few weeks. I’ve ordered a review copy of “MediaWiki Administrator’s Tutorial Guide” and will write what I think here. A guy on the MediaWiki-l mailing list recommended it, so I’m interested.
Finally I recommend Akismet to anyone running a WordPress blog. If like me you allow anonymous comments, you can easily get spammed. WordPress tells me: “Akismet has caught 53 spam for you since you first installed it.” - all without me even seeing it!
WordPress put out another security release a few days ago which I only noticed today. This blog is running 2.1.3; right now WaggishBLOG is not. I created a guide for upgrading in my personal setup on the Xinki Lab wiki.
I started individually downloading the files making up MediaWiki 1.10 (the next unreleased version for those who don’t know) from the Subversion repo today. After 20 minutes I could no longer be bothered and decided I could wait the few weeks (days maybe?) until 1.10 is released. When it is, I’ll install it at sweet-technology.co.uk before it’s rolled out across all Xinki wikis.
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.
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.