Alden Bates' Weblog

Wikia: A Case Study in Keeping Your Users Happy

(not)

Some two years ago, when Wikia introduced their new Monaco site skin, the Transformers Wiki moved to independent hosting citing a number of complaints, such as misleading the community, and ignoring dissent and forging ahead with changes.

Wikia are now introducing an even newer skin. Have Wikia learned from TFWiki's departure? Well, from what I can tell from the Community Central blogs, they haven't changed a heck of a lot. Though they said that the skin was going to be mandatory for all Wiki, and that individual Wiki were not going to be allowed to modify the skin beyond a background image and colours, there were a couple of notable exceptions. One particular "shot themselves in the foot" moment was when Wikia offered to let the World of Warcraft Wikia widen the skin, apparently in an attempt to prevent them moving to independent hosting.

There have been many vocal protests on Wikia's staff blog entries, but despite those Wikia are forging ahead with little change to the skin, which has caused a bunch of Wiki to head for independent hosting. The aforementioned World of Warcraft wiki can now be found at WoWPedia.org, and Halopedia seems to be the latest Wikia to move. The skin change has even resulted in a movement calling itself the Anti-Wikia Alliance.

How much will this affect Wikia? Probably not much in the short term, as they get to keep copies of all of the wiki that leave, but in the long term...

The Scourge of Web Toolbars

So, I've noticed a new web design element spreading insidiously across the web. Suddenly you can add web toolbars, which float at the bottom of the browser window, to your website, so every user who visits your site gets an extra toolbar full of various tools which may or may not be useful depending on your usual internet hangouts.

Wibiya, for instance, has one which will link to your Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube account, and allow visitors to Tweet or "like" your site (you can see a demo of a Wibiya bar on Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic). The Meebo Bar similarly allows you to link to Facebook, Twitter, et al. I first started noticing the things when Wikia threw one on their new skin.

Is this a new trend? I note that, unlike toolbars which are actually built into your browser, you can't turn them off. I also wonder if there are privacy concerns here — if a company can get its toolbar on enough sites, they can start building up a pretty comprehensive picture of people's browsing habits. Of course, this isn't new, and web bugs have been around for years, but these web toolbars seem to add an extra carrot to entice webmasters to place them on their web site. Hrm.

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Farewell Bloglines

Some time ages ago, I picked Bloglines as a feed aggregator. I'd already tried a bunch of non-web applications, but running something separate from my browser to keep track of new posts on web sites somehow seemed counter productive. For one thing, it meant I had to have my computer polling all these sites itself, looking for new posts. It made much more sense to use a web-based service, that would poll the sites for a bunch of people.

Bloglines is a pretty good service, with a simple and clean interface. It worked well for what I wanted, and made it pretty easy to find new stuff that interested me. It wasn't perfect, but I suspect half the problems I had with it were at least in part attributable to my internet connection, which sometimes works well, and sometimes works like a brick. Unfortunately when I logged onto Bloglines about a week ago, there was a notice saying that it's closing down at the end of the month. For now, I'm giving Google Reader a go, since Google controls everything anyway.

So, thank you, Bloglines, for years of service. I hope the team goes on to even bigger and better things.

Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 11-13

A tremendous end to an awesome series.

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Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 8-10

This series is, so far, the best the new show's managed. That said, the latest three episodes have been variable...

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Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 4-7

Yes, I'm slow about posting these. I blame RTD for sapping my interest in Doctor Who. Moffat is slowly winning it back, episode by episode, but it's a long, uphill struggle.

As usual, spoilers abound.

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This may be a Transformer

At last, a site dedicated to rooting out the cybernetic organisms hiding in plain sight:
Transformer Sightings

They're everywhere, man!

Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 1-3

A very lightweight start to the season. More comments after the cut to avoid spoilering anyone who might not have watched it.

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Save who from Berlusconi?

Here's a strange thing - web sites are showing up in google with the query string "Save Us from Berlusconi" appended to the end of their URL, like http://somedomain.com/?q=Save+Us+from+Berlusconi. Witness: Google results. There's even a long thread about it on Google Support. I happened to notice it when a Google Blog search came up with the errant query string added onto the Transformers Wiki and Seibertron.com URLs.

I suspect the way that they may be getting in there is by someone adding the URL with query string to Google Reader. Why someone would do this is a question in itself. What are they hoping to achieve? It's clearly a political statement, but delivered in a distinctly odd manner.

Moonbases alpha and beta

I love poking around in the corners of Transformers canon. Last night I was watching the Super-God Masterforce episode "God Ginrai - Into the Sky!!" and suddenly realised that the moon base captain who appears in a couple of scenes was the same guy as the commander of the Lunar Base in the Victory episode "The Brave Hero of the Universe - Star Saber". It's probably just a case of the animators pulling the character models out of a drawer - the crew exosuits and even a satellite are also duplicated across the two episodes. It's also kinda implied in the Masterforce episode that the moonbase crew were all killed. They're not mentioned as having been rescued, and the last time we see them, they're all zapped with Mr Freeze gun. Since they were all wearing space suits, it's probably feasible that they somehow survived, and since the commander turns up later, I guess it's canon.

It's a kinda cool bit of continuity between the two series, though I have to pity the poor guy - he was put in charge of two different moon bases, and both times the Decepticons came and blew them up.

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Paged Archives 1.4

I was totally not going to upgrade to Movable Type 5.1, but then I was emailed by German user Elisa Stulpe, who said that my Paged Archives plugin wasn't working in the new version of MT.

So. Long story short, I've just released a new version of the plugin, which you can download on the Paged Archives page. The new version only works with MT5.1, so if you're still running MT4.3 or what have you, stick with version 1.31 of the plugin.

I took the opportunity to fix a few things as well. One was that someone mentioned that <b> is a depreciated tag, and may stop pages validating. The current page in the page listing is now bolded using a <span> tag with a class of "pacurrent" set on it, so if you want to change the styling in your css, you can apply it to that class.

Also, there's a new setting that someone asked for a couple of years ago (Yes, that's how long it's been since the last version two years).

Also, now when PA writes the pages out, it runs them through MT's encode function with whatever your chosen Chartype is. This may seem an odd thing to need to do, as surely everything's stored internally in your chosen encoding, but apparently it's the right thing to do.

The only thing I didn't get done on my to-do list was to add documentation links to the tags. When you're editing a template, a list of available tags appears in the right-hand column. Normally the tags are linked to the documentation for that tag, but the tags for Paged Archives all point to Google searches instead. So far as I can tell, the only way I can fix this is by completely restructuring the plugin to use the new style "registry" introduced in MT4. Eh.

Tl;dr: There's a new version of Paged Archives, but only for people running Movable Type 5.1.

Upgrading a server to Movable Type 5.1

As I'm informed by a user that Paged Archives isn't working under the new Movable Type 5.1, I'm going to have to install the new MT on a test server so I can fix my plugin. Because I know from experience that upgrading a Movable Type install is hideously tortuous, I'm going to document the process here in the hopes it may help someone who is going through the same process.

Step one, obviously, is to download MT51. I note as I do that the zip file containing MT5.1 is listed as 8.5MB 50% bigger than that for the previous version. Although that appears to be inaccurate, as the zip file I download is only 6.8MB.

Step two is to unzip the thing and rearrange the directories into a more sensible order. The contents of a Movable Type zip always seem to be in a strange order which never makes any sense to me and never configured how I'd expect a live server to look. Maybe this is why it doesn't have an inbuilt update system like Wordpress. Once I've shifted everything around, deleted the useless empty directories, the php directory (since I don't use dynamic publishing) and the plugins I don't use, I zip everything back up and upload it to my test site.

While I'm waiting for it to upload, I notice a box on the download page saying "Easy to use, easy to install - Movable Type is easier to use than ever before, with a redesign user interface and a brand new installation wizard." A "redesign user interface"?

The upload done, I log into my site's control panel and use the File Manager they provide to unzip the file. Of course, because I'm using zip instead of gz, it means all the scripts have to have their execute bit manually set, but at least unlike gz it doesn't default the file owner to something Apache can't access, as it seemed to do last time I tried that.

Step three, run the upgrade script. This gives me a screen with "Upgrading database...", an empty box and a spinning blue barber pole. I go do something else for ten minutes, and come back to find it in exactly the same state. I hit back and click the button again and go an play a game for ten minutes. The same thing happens. Uh, maybe the update was successful? I go to the main mt script, and it kicks me back into the updater which doesn't work. Because I'm insane, I humour it by clicking on the button again and getting the same result.

OK, maybe there's strange incompatibility between Chrome and MT's upgrader. I load up FireFox and do step three again. While that's running, I check the Upgrade Guide to see if it has any relevant info. And ten minutes on, Firefox is having the same results.

After catching up on Lost, I decide to try the "fresh installation" mentioned on the Upgrade guide, so I delete/rename the existing files, and extract the zip file again. This time, it works! Well, as far as things actually appearing on the screen goes, that is. Partway through it crashes to a halt with "Error during upgrade: Can't call method "site_path" on an undefined value at lib/MT/Upgrade/v5.pm line 417."

Luckily this page has information about the problem and suggests moving the "themes" directory into the directory where MT is. Even though I'm not using themes. Finally the upgrade script successfully completes and I can get to the MT back end.

Running the upgrade script three times seems to have the consequence that MT thinks I have three websites or something. There's probably a way to delete the extra ones, but since it's only a test server, I don't particularly care. It's installed, and I can test the Paged Archives plugin with it.

Now everything's ready, I go to the blog's plugin page and get the error "Can't call method "label" on unblessed reference". What? Assuming that there's some major incompatibility in PA which is hosing the plugins page, I delete PA. Same result. I delete the only other plugin I have there. No change. Another Google gives me this post from January, which describes the same problem, but is unanswered.

Aha, apparently it was related to the themes directory (again). I'd ended up with both of the themes directories from the zip in the same place. One was meant to be in the directory with my static files, the other was meant to be in the MT directory. Once I separated them into the right places, it worked again.

Now to get PagedArchives working with it. It looks like some of the functions I was relying on have moved. I suspect it may require a separate version of the plugin for MT 5.

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Why does...

Google has this awesome search suggest feature, which shows you what the most popular searches are for the query you're starting to type in.

Hmm, lotta hygiene conscious women out there.

And a lot of people with dogs that eat poop.

The End of Time, Part 2

Like part 1, I pretty much knew what to expect, as it was typical of just about every Davies finale thus far. Despite it having many good moments, it felt ultimately like a bit of a let down. This was Davies' last chance to write a finale, and instead he more or less repeats himself.

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The End of Time, Part 1

To summarise in advance: The End of Time, Part 1 is an example of a typical first part of a Russell T Davies finale. If you're seen his previous finales, you'll know what to expect.

Right, from here on, spoiler warning apply.

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