After taking a break from the blogging world for 15 months, I’m back!
What caused me to not write anything during this period? You might be able to guess based on my last two posts: Wikidata happened. While I’m continuing to work hard on this project, I decided its time for me to pay some more attention to other things as well, and perhaps blog about these.
I started my blog back in 2009 on a shared hosting plan where I did not have SSH access. Not that I knew what SSH was back then. This blog was uploaded to that host using FileZilla (oh my, I was even still running Windows!). The story for my personal wiki is very similar. At some point I got fed up with this and moved both my blog and my wiki to the VPS of a friend of mine. (Thanks for hosting me!) Since I now have my own VPS, I decided a few weeks back that I ought to move my blog and wiki there. This process happened in steps, leaving some things a bit broken and unfinished in between. Now it is completely finished though, so everything should be both new and shiny and functional.
My blog and wiki are now at www.bn2vs.com/blog and www.bn2vs.com/wiki. The old subdomain URLs are redirecting to the new locations.
My wiki is a fresh install of a recent MediaWiki with a manual import of the content of my old wiki that I cared to keep around. This old wiki had, as so many wiki out there, problems with spam bots. It did have some anti-spam measures enabled, though at some point these proved to be insufficient. Being to busy with other things and not really using this wiki much, I failed to notice this for over half a year. Though the bots failed to create any new pages, they did manage to bypass the registration and edit protection. They thus ended up vandalizing the two dozen or so pages already there. Though this resulted in a quite amusing “battle of the spambots”, where the content of each page got replaced every minute by another bot, it also blew up the size of the wiki db somewhat (~3GB). It thus seemed wise to not do a db import. I tried exporting the relevant pages (only the latest revisions, after I restored the correct content) using MediaWikis XML export and import, though this refused to work. I got all kinds of errors, tried different versions of MediaWiki, even fixing the code, all to no avail. Sometimes doing something manually is the best approach I’m planning to create some more content there, in particular about things I’m studying and about how you can hire me to write awesome code.
This blog on the other hand contains a full import of the old one. Minus the images. Perhaps I get around to fixing that, though it seems likely laziness will win that battle. The image at the top depicts (part of) my current workspace. ASCII fish! Edit: The images are now also back!
So do stay tuned for upcoming posts on my Wikidata related work, Semantic MediaWiki, writing high quality software, random things I came across and lots of entropy.