2013
Great lunch with Matt Hardy learning about Kidblog. Cool stuff going on there!
Fun panel conversation this morning at The Collaborative event with Justin Kaufenberg.
Congrats Marc Frons! Well done!
@rajivpant: BtoB Business Media selects @MarcFrons among Top Innovators!
Double down. Urban Bean Coffee ☕️
What’s the big problem with having wires on your bike computer?! I like wires!
Trying to buy tubes for my road bike. Every tube has equal number of 1 star and 5 star reviews. 😕
Just finished a fabulous bike ride on my road bike without pulling a kid behind me. Awesome.
Really looking forward to The New Standards tonight at the Dakota!
Started down the path of leaving Quicken after 15 years and moving to You Need A Budget. I’m hopeful!
I just backed Aaron Swartz Documentary - The Internet’s Own Boy on Kickstarter.
Strong hour on my spin bike. Felt good. Legs had a lot left if them. My Vitamix treat after the spin.
Trying to abandon Quicken and make the leap to just using my bank website like the kids do these days. Terrifying.
Trying to use the Paychex website and filled with rage over “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.”. Way to “upgrade”…
Display MediaWiki job queue size inside your wiki
I wanted to find an easy way to show the current size of the MediaWiki job queue on WikiApiary. When you make changes to templates that are used on thousands of pages the queue can get backed up and it’s nice to have an easy way to keep an eye on this. The job queue is even one of the data points WikiApiary tracks and graphs. But I wanted something that was as close to realtime as possible. It wasn’t hard to do. This solution uses the External Data (see WikiApiary usage page) extension.
First we need to get the data. Let’s start by calling the siteinfo API method. The magic words are used to make this generic, and this should result in the right URL. If you are using a protocol-relative server setting you will have to modify this.
{{#get_web_data: url={{SERVER}}{{SCRIPTPATH}}/api.php?action=query&meta;=siteinfo&siprop;=statistics&format;=json
| format=JSON
| data=jobs=jobs}}
Now External Data has done the work and the value is stored for us. Now we get it by simply calling:
{{#external_value:jobs}}
I like to put that in a style so it’s big and obvious.
If you’re thinking ahead you’ll now be saying “Yeah, that’s neat, but it
will be cached in MediaWiki for a hours!”. Yes, it will be unless you
add a __NOCACHE__ directive to the page and use
the
MagicNoCache
extension. This extension allows you to disable the MediaWiki cache on a
page-by-page basis, very handy.
If you wanted to use this in multiple places you could even put an
<onlyinclude> around it and transclude the job
queue size in other pages, however I would be cautious about that if
using the __NOCACHE__ directive as well.
April in Minneapolis.
Thanks to my buddy Kent for turning me onto The Gaslight Anthem. Started with The ‘59 Sound. Great album! #music
As you reflect on the gun bill vote yesterday, it’s worth watching Larry Lessig’s TED talk “We the People”.
Explosion at Boston Marathon. Know only that Jim Bernard is fine.
On related news, the Boston Marathon iPhone app is really, really bad. Unfortunate. Such potential.
Digging some ideas of putting Panic Status Board panels together with data from WikiApiary. Hmmm…