A first look at WikiCrowd
I have quite enjoyed the odd contribution to an app by Google called Crowdsource. You can find it either on the web, or also as an app. Crowdsource allows people to throw data at Google in controlled ways to add to the massive pile of data that Google uses to improve its services and at…
Pushing patches to sr.ht git repos
I recently wrote a blog post using the taavi/laravel-socialite-mediawiki PHP library which is hosted on sr.ht. sr.ht, or sourcehut is “is a collection of tools useful for software development”, including git repository hosting. I had to make a change to the library, and this was my first time contributing to a sr.ht repository. The workflow…
Laravel 8 with Wikimedia OAuth login
I recently wrote a little app called wikicrowd (blog post to follow) using Laravel and MediaWiki / Wikimedia authentication. It certainly wasn’t entirely out of the box, and the existing docs still need some tweaking. This post reflects the steps I went through to set this app up, and it should only take a few…
Installing Android Studio on WSL2 for Flutter
I’m trying to do some “modern” Android development and want to experiment with Flutter while running Windows, and WSL2 with Ubuntu. Flutter isn’t as easy to install as some programs, no simple apt-get etc, but instead a collection of binaries distributed by different organizations that all need to be tied together. To start with, you’ll…
Wikidata user and project talk page connection graph
Talk pages are a pretty key part of how wikis have worked over the years. Realtime chat apps and services are probably changing this dynamic somewhat, but they are still used, and also most of the history of these pages is still recorded. I started up an IPython Notebook to try and take a look…
Finding the most liked tweets for a topic in a year
I’m nearly halfway through writing a month of daily blog posts. I wanted to write some posts covering the history of both Wikidata and Wikibase on Twitter. Being a developer, I looked for APIs, but it seems tweets are not as accessible as they once were. This is a short write up of my adventure,…
A PHP library for jsonstorage.net
I first heard about jsonstorage.net when searching around for a quick place to persist some data while writing a Twitter bot. jsonstorage.net provides a simple JSON storage, with a free tier that can be very useful for small personal projects. The REST API is super simple, GET POST PUT DELETE etc. You can have either public…
SMWCon 2021, Development environments using containers
SMWCon 2021 is happening as I write this post. I was invited to give a short talk as part of a MediaWiki and Docker workshop organized by Cindy Cicalese on day 2. As I am writing a month of blog posts I’m going to turn my slides into a more digestible and searchable online blog…
Dispatching custom event in Fitbit SDK
I just upgraded my Fitbit charge 2 from 2016, to a Fitbit sense from 2020. After getting everything set up I took a quick look at the developer documentation and found myself in a web based IDE called Fitbit studio and before I knew it I had sideloaded a development demo app onto my new…
mediawiki-docker-dev in mwcli
The original mediawiki-docker-dev environment was created by accident and without much design back in 2017. In 2020 I started working on a new branch with some intentional design and quite liked the direction. And now finally, the all of the mediawiki-docker-dev functionality exists in a new home, with more intentional design, tests, stability, releases and…