How to update Hugo on Debian
Really this is just notes for myself, but maybe someone else finds it useful.
River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog
RheingoldRiver's blog - MediaWiki development, Leaguepedia stories, and productivity hacks
Latest posts
Glossary of ambiguous terms
Template and Preload are different, as are Widget , Module , and Gadget . Here’s a small glossary
Everything about cargo_attach
What does #cargo_attach do? How do you use it? And more
snake_case in Cargo sucks
Cargo will sometimes confusingly change your underscores to spaces if you use snake_case in your field names, so please don’t do that
Gluing & framing a 9000-piece jigsaw
How I glued Ravensburger’s 9000-piece Dragon Forest puzzle
How to fix Alt+Shift+S
Edge interferes with the Alt+Shift+S hotkey, here’s how to fix it
Pink Water Lilies timelapse
A timelapse of solving Ravensburger Pink Water Lilies 4000 piece puzzle
ParserPower, argmap, and iargmap
My talk from MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 in Sandusky, Ohio
Bookmark keywords, again
How & why I use bookmark keywords and bookmarklets for searching in Firefox
How to see your template edits in action
When you edit a template, you will need to bypass cache somehow to see the effect of that edit on a content page
Books published in 2024 (part 2)
Mini reviews of fiction published in 2024, part 2!
Books I read that were published in 2024
Mini reviews of fiction published in 2024
How to join the Wikipedia Discord
Click here if you want to join the Wikipedia Discord server!
The Tag That Shall Not Be Named
A quick post about transclusion, partial transclusion, The Tag That Shall Not Be Named, and whitespace
A Great Comet live performance review
I saw Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 live, and I have THOUGHTS (it was incredible!)
What I have learned about 3D printing
I started 3D printing and I do not recommend it as a hobby
Give people early successes
Someone was wrong on the internet and I’ve taught basic coding to a lot of self-described non-developers
How to refresh cache in MediaWiki
Caching can be super complicated in MediaWiki because there are many different types of cache. This article goes over what to do for each kind.
mwclient 0.11
mwclient 0.11 has released!
How to make Moorish 8-4
A tutorial for Moorish 8-4, a chainmaille weave I designed in 2016
Please use recentchanges
The page MediaWiki:Sidebar is powered by other interface messages, use them!
Representing one-to-many relations
Several examples of video game mechanics that could be represented as one-to-many relations and how to do table design & queries
Introducing the SORCERER example wiki
Enjoy beautiful mspaint drawings and learn Cargo!
Notes on "Charlatan" by Pope Brock
John R. Brinkley is a fascinating historical figure whose biography feels too improbable to be true.
Notes on The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Some tables & lists of Wikipedia links that may help you while reading this fantastic book on the events leading up to World War I
What's up with Variables and Parsoid?
What you need to know about Parsoid development as it affects Extension:Variables
Book Review - Building a StoryBrand
A review of and some notes on “Building a StoryBrand”
Gadget - Copy title
A gadget that provides one-click buttons to copy the title or (or pageName) of a MediaWiki page
Style your code blocks with Pygments
Customizing your view-page syntax highlighting in MediaWiki
Markdown vs Wikitext
An at-a-glance guide to formatting Wikitext vs Markdown
One-to-many tables & #vardefine
#vardefine doesn’t always play nice with the order in which you need to evaluate code. Here are some solutions.
Send me your wiki-updating scripts!
Contribute to my list of resources for editing MediaWiki with code
Dealing with defaults
There are a lot of different things you can mean when you say “default parameter” in MediaWiki. This article explains them all.
How to install Sublime Text & Mediawiker
A step-by-step guide with screenshots on installing and configuring Sublime Text with the Mediawiker extension
If {{NAMESPACE}} do nothing, otherwise...
A common design pattern in MediaWiki templating is to write {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}|<!-- do nothing -->|<!-- otherwise...-->}}
Book Review - The Field Guide to Global Payments
A review of “A Field Guide to Global Payments,” including a table of initialisms used in the book.
Ordering a Cargo field
How can you enforce a sorting order on a Cargo field when displaying tabular data?
ShareX image effects
How to use ShareX image effects & spam your friends with rainbows
How to use Weblate
A guide to using Weblate as a translator
How to use Dev Tools
Learn how to edit CSS interactively
Surfaces with pentominoes
Embedding a grid on a surface doesn’t really work, but we can approximate.
Serialization woes
My journey of encoding pentominoes on surfaces into permalinks
I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023
I attended EMWCon 2023 remotely again in 2023 and finally gave the presentation everyone has been waiting for: I don’t like infoboxes.
List-type fields, for realsies
What are list-type fields? What aren’t they? How do I query them?
Mediawiker 3.6.14
SublimeText extension Mediawiker 3.6.14 release update, plus some bonuses
Book review - Everybody Writes
“Everybody Writes” was deeply disappointing to me because it wasn’t the book I wanted to read. That said, I think it can be a valuable resource for people who want an introductory and accessible writing book.
How I found four marketing books
Subtitle: I dropped my keys - no, I mean bouncy balls - no, I mean information - in the light and learned to stop looking for it in the dark: An information-seeking parable
Paste a transparent-background image with PIL
How to paste a transparent-background image file over another file using PIL, or WTF is a mask and how does it work?
Fandom update
An update on my time with Leaguepedia.
Book review - Recoding Gender
A review of the book “Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing”