Geospatial search for Wikidata Query Service
Geospatial search is up and running for the Wikidata Query Service! This allows you to search for items with coordinates that are located within a certain radius or within a bounding box. Along side the the map that can be used to display results for the query service this really is a great tool for…
Wikidata Map May 2016 (Belarus & Uganda)
I originally posted about the Wikidata maps back in early 2015 and have followed up with a few posts since looking at interesting developments. This is another one of those posts covering the changes since the last post, so late 2015, to now, May 2016. The new maps look very similar to the naked eye and…
Using Chrome Extension Generator for the first time
Chrome Extension Generator by yeoman is an npm package that can be used to very easily scaffold out a Chrome extension. Over the past year I have poked and prodded at a few chrome extensions, and ended up publishing one to display download counts on GitHub. I highly recommend this generator, it creates everything you need out…
sMite
sMite stands for ‘simple Mite’, which to most people still means nothing at all. Mite is a time tracking web service, and depending on how companies make use of it things can become more complicated than they should be. smite is how I tried to tackle this complexity in less than 8 hours!
Refactoring around WatchedItem in MediaWiki
The refactoring started as part of [RFC] Expiring watch list entries. After an initial draft patch was made touching all of the necessary areas it was decided refactoring first would be a good idea as the change initially spanned many files. It is always good to do things properly ® instead of pushing forward in…
T460 & Windows 10
A few weeks ago I was blessed with a new Lenovo ThinkPad T460 to replace my old and very beaten up HP Pavilion DV6-3180EA. This also meant an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 that I have been putting off for some time. Here are my first impressions of both the T460 and Windows 10.
Language usage on Wikidata
Wikidata is a multilingual project, but due to the size of the project it is hard to get a view on the usage of languages. For some time now the Wikidata dashboards have existed on the Wikimedia grafana install. These dashboards contain data about the language content of the data model by looking at terms (labels, descriptions…
The break in Wikidata edits on 28 Jan 2016
On the 28th of January 2016 all Wikimedia MediaWiki APIs had 2 short outages. The outage is documented on Wikitech here. The outage didn’t have much of an impact on most projects hosted by Wikimedia. However due to most Wikidata editing happening through the API, even when using the UI, the project basically stopped for roughly…
My Joomla Component development workflow
My first and currently only Joomla component development was for the SWA UK website. The component manages memberships, events, tickets, results and more and is a rewrite of a previous component for Joomla 1. But in this post lets ignore what the component does and instead concentrate the development workflow that is used. After lots of…
Building applications around Wikidata (a beer example)
Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be…