Month: August 2023

Verifying Wikimedia user page links on Mastodon

by

While reviewing the ongoings of the 2023 Wikimedia hackathon, I learned about the RealMe MediaWiki extension, which is already deployed to Wikimedia sites and allows verification of URLs that appear on user pages within other software or platforms, such as Mastodon.

Link verification for dummies

Imagine you want to show that your online profiles, like on Mastodon, truly belong to you. One way to do this is by using a special code called “rel=me”. It’s like saying, “Hey, this link over here is connected to me.” However, there’s a catch: both the link and the page it points to need to say they’re connected.

On platforms like Mastodon, you can add links to your other profiles. The platform then checks if those profiles also point back to your original page using the same “rel=me” code. If they do, your link gets a stamp of approval, showing it’s really yours.

The RealMe extension allows you to configure a set of links on your user page that include this “rel=me” special code that other systems, such as Mastodon, can check.

Configuring it

This one took me a few minutes to get working after reading the instructions, but on meta.wikimedia.org I added a link to my Mastodon profile, enabled the setting on meta, headed over to my Mastodon profile to add the link, and tada, it is verified!

Read more

Dependency injection in go using fx, and replacing services for test

by

I’m writing a new go application and ended up giving fx (by uber) a try for dependency injection. The getting started docs were brilliant for my use case (creating an API), but the examples for how to inject mock services for tests were lacking, so I decided to write some code examples of how I am currently using fx in tests.

General app setup

I set up my whole application in a app package, which pulls in all services that are needed.

Most of these are provided as constructor functions, with some more dynamic registration of routes as is done in the getting started docs.

package app

func New(additionalOpts ...fx.Option) *fx.App {
	return fx.New(
		fx.Provide(
			config.NewDefault,
			ses.NewSES,
			ses.NewEmailSender,
			mysql.NewGormGB,
			middleware.NewLimiterFactory,
			middleware.NewAuth,
			AsRoute(handlers.UserLogin),
			AsRoute(handlers.ListStuff),
			fx.Annotate(
				router.NewGinRouter,
				fx.ParamTags(`group:"routes"`),
			),
			server.NewHTTPServer,
		),
		fx.Invoke(func(*http.Server) {}),
		fx.Options(additionalOpts...),
	)
}Code language: Go (go)

Read more

Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file on Cloudflare R2 and Internet Archive

by
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Your own Wikidata Query Service

At the end of 2022, I published a Blazegraph JNL file for Wikidata in a Google Cloud bucket for 1 month for folks to download and determine if it was useful.

Thanks to Arno from weblyzard, inflatador from the WMF search platform team, and Mark from the Internet Archive for the recent conversations around this topic.

You can now grab some new JNL files from a few days ago, hosted on either the Internet Archive or Cloudflare R2.

Read more