Beginning 2018

Fremantle

It's the fourth day of 2018, and nothing seems much different from 2017 yet. I'm still too slow at cutting bits of wood to the right size, and too indecisive about how much of my inaccuracies I want to leave showing in a finished piece, and so my wine glass shelves have progressed slowly. On the code front, I'm still trying to build a working system to extract my and my friends' photos from Flickr — the delays mostly around the best ways to keep them in MediaWiki (i.e. templates, using Cargo or not, etc.). One good thing that's happened is that GlobalPreferences' required changes to MediaWiki core have been merged, and so work can begin in earnest on the extension itself. This isn't yet that exciting, as no new functionality is being introduced, but we're one step closer to local overrides (and maybe one day even deploying the blasted thing).

My experiment in wiki-based genealogy research (over on ArchivesWiki) is progressing, and some issues around generating GraphViz graphs of human relationships are being resolved. One thing that looks like it could be useful is an idea to introduce a {{SHORTDESC:Lorem ipsum}} magic word. I reckon this could be the thing that is displayed in parentheses after a person's name in family trees (it'd beat the current system of attempting to glean a useful year-only date range out of non-standardized and variable-granularity date formats).