If you check the 'skins' part of your 'preferences' page you'll find there is a new skin available. This skin is called 'ShiftiMin' (a reference to it's supremely minimal look) and has been tested (and found functional) on all browsers. There is a caveat, however… Despite our best efforts there is a problem with the way IE renders the drop-down menus that contain the functionality that used to be found in the side-bar.
Anyway… Feel free to try the skin—it isn't going anywhere :) Please be patient if you're looking forward to our "grand redesign"—while the 'ShiftiMin' skin doesn't meet the requirement that it be fully functional and free of all rendering errors on all platforms, it comes close. We may actually be able to offer a slightly different setup for it soon that doesn't have any problems.
:--[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 03:24, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
=== {{Separator|k|Old News}} ===
We're extending a branch to our authors—there are about sixty of you now and it's time to harness your energy. Authors on Shifti now have the ability to edit any page. Use this power wisely—whether it's for categorization or helping out with the 'editing requested' pages… Now… We [[Shifti:Administrators|the administrators]] will be watching—anyone using this privilege to cause trouble will get temporarily banned.
We're extending a branch to our authors—there are about sixty of you now and it's time to harness your energy. Authors on Shifti now have the ability to edit any page. Use this power wisely—whether it's for categorization or helping out with the 'editing requested' pages… Now… We [[Shifti:Administrators|the administrators]] will be watching—anyone using this privilege to cause trouble will get temporarily banned.
:--[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 08:21, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
:--[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 08:21, 22 February 2009 (UTC)
=== {{Separator|k|Old News}} ===
There is a new 'skin' available in your preferences page named 'TooCool'. It has the name because it is 'Too Cool For IE'—in other words it uses features of the existing standards such as CSS2 that are not supported by Internet Explorer. There is a completely new 'default' skin in the works—possibly based off 'Too Cool' (though likely not, as [[User:Viqsi|Viqsi]] is looking to make the design much more minimal)—so stay tuned.
There is a new 'skin' available in your preferences page named 'TooCool'. It has the name because it is 'Too Cool For IE'—in other words it uses features of the existing standards such as CSS2 that are not supported by Internet Explorer. There is a completely new 'default' skin in the works—possibly based off 'Too Cool' (though likely not, as [[User:Viqsi|Viqsi]] is looking to make the design much more minimal)—so stay tuned.
Revision as of 22:24, 25 February 2009
If you check the 'skins' part of your 'preferences' page you'll find there is a new skin available. This skin is called 'ShiftiMin' (a reference to it's supremely minimal look) and has been tested (and found functional) on all browsers. There is a caveat, however… Despite our best efforts there is a problem with the way IE renders the drop-down menus that contain the functionality that used to be found in the side-bar.
Anyway… Feel free to try the skin—it isn't going anywhere :) Please be patient if you're looking forward to our "grand redesign"—while the 'ShiftiMin' skin doesn't meet the requirement that it be fully functional and free of all rendering errors on all platforms, it comes close. We may actually be able to offer a slightly different setup for it soon that doesn't have any problems.
We're extending a branch to our authors—there are about sixty of you now and it's time to harness your energy. Authors on Shifti now have the ability to edit any page. Use this power wisely—whether it's for categorization or helping out with the 'editing requested' pages… Now… We the administrators will be watching—anyone using this privilege to cause trouble will get temporarily banned.
There is a new 'skin' available in your preferences page named 'TooCool'. It has the name because it is 'Too Cool For IE'—in other words it uses features of the existing standards such as CSS2 that are not supported by Internet Explorer. There is a completely new 'default' skin in the works—possibly based off 'Too Cool' (though likely not, as Viqsi is looking to make the design much more minimal)—so stay tuned.
In the same vein, these are the rendering engines that have been tested against the 'Too Cool' design and found to work perfectly:
Gecko based browsers (Tested against Gecko 1.91)
FireFox 3.0.6 is the browser that was used for the primary layout testing
Epiphany from Gnome 2.24 was also used in testing
FireFox 2 was tested by others, but I have no idea if the curved borders on some elements is supported. (research suggests that it is supported, but I am unsure)
WebKit based browsers (Tested against several versions, including the latest SVN)
The latest stable Arora (compiled against Qt 4.4.3) was used in testing
The 'QtLauncher' test browser from the latest SVN of WebKit was also used
KHTML based browsers (Tested against the version in KDE 4.2)
Due to back-porting of code from WebKit, KHTML is very comparable in capabilities to WebKit
The following browsers work but do not support all the CSS
Opera (Tested against Opera 9.63)
The only feature not supported by Opera is the 'border-radius' used to give rounded corners to some elements. There is a -o-border-radius in Opera 9, but it was removed by the time Opera 9.5 was released. According to reports, it will be a standard feature (no -o- prefix) in Opera 10.
The following browsers were tested and found not to work at all:
Internet Explorer 5
Internet Explorer 5.5
Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 7
The results varied, but in general the tested versions of Internet Explorer did not support the CSS 2 display property of 'table-row' or 'table-cell' which are used to provide the main content areas layout. No tested version of Internet Explorer implements the CSS 3 'border-radius' feature.
Since the possible solutions for making this layout work in IE did not handle being scaled to a small window without the main content elements winding up stacked on top of each other I decided to declare this skin as being 'Too Cool For IE' and offer it for use to the people out there not using Internet Explorer. If this seems somewhat elitist to you… All I have to say is this—Internet Explorer is a Microsoft product and they have continually refused to fix it so that it actually works. Even their latest—IE 8—does not offer the level of support for the standards that other browsers do.
Work is still in progress on the 'Too Cool' skin—and some of the Special Pages (okay, most of them) appear to trigger a rendering bug in FireFox and other Gecko-based browsers. So… It looks like my announcement of it was premature. I'm going to pull it from production for the time being.
And the server is under a massive assault from hackers at current. They have been hammering on all the doors—even the mail server. This may have been what caused the crash at about 9:25EST tonight. The crash itself was easily recovered from but I'm not going to make any guarantees that it won't happen again—if it was one of the hackers that caused it, they will try again.
As Shifti gets more popular we will probably also face the kinds of problems that other popular sites face. The vandalism should be easily controlled, but a DDoS will be impossible for us to survive. There is no question about this—we'd have to be built like a really massive site (say Google or Wikipedia) to survive.
For the last several months we've been discussing changing Shifti from the default 'Monobook' skin that almost all MediaWiki based sites use to something different. While we are still a month or more away from changing to the new look, work on the redesign has been slowly and steadily progressing. A few days ago Craven—the artist that has designed the cover for the Best of Shifti book—sent me and Viqsi an image of the redesign. I've poked at it and managed to almost replicate the image in HTML and have handed off that work to Viqsi for the final polish.
The actual layout has been mostly settled on, but the navigation links and menus are still a toss-up. In fact… the design I handed to Viqsi doesn't even have the 'page', 'discussion', 'edit', etc… links that you see at the top of almost every page.
Have changed to a math-based captcha—it apparently has a minor error ('cannot create or write to temporary directory') but it is working. Sorry for taking so long to realize this problem.
Disabled the captcha system for the time being. The one we've been using doesn't generate images properly and appears to have problems with the 'simple' version and the 'math' versions as well.
Re-enabled the captchas after confirming that generating the images on another machine didn't create the 'ink smear' effect from them. So our biggest anti-spam measure is alive and well. I am sorry that some of the images might contain letters that are…less than interpretable. However this is a bonus for everyone, since it means that only the most complex of captcha breaking mechanisms will be effective.
I've been very busy for the last few days. Every story listed in Stories By Setting now uses the {{universe}} template—which means they also now have the setting semantic property. Just today I distributed the {{author tag}} template to the User: pages of everyone listed as an author, meaning they now have the author name semantic property and have made it through the 'B' listings in Stories By Author in making sure that they are using {{title}}, {{byline}} or have an {{author tag}} for each author.
But this is not a project any single person should be tackling. I'd like to ask all authors of Shifti to add at least {{fiction}} to your stories and would like it if you'd use {{TF Type}}, {{TF Degree}} and {{TF Species}} for each transformation in the story. This will add semantic properties to your stories that will help people locate the story when using the Semantic Search facility or the {{#ask}} inline query system.
For further information about semantic tagging, see Help:Semantic tags and for information about the semantic search facility, see Help:Semantic search. If those pages do not provide enough information for you (or you have other questions) then you can ask for help on one of the Administrators Talk: pages or find us on IRC at irc.lapinia.org (usually in the channel #transformations). We're always helpful and even if there isn't an administrator there other users may be able to answer your question.
You may have noticed, if you watch the Recent Changes page, that there is a Help: page for Custom CSS and a page of Custom CSS Hacks. What are they about? What does it mean? Well... Late at night on Valentines Day Fish came to me looking for help getting the formatting of his new story {{#show: User:Fish/Mad Hatters and Musical Chairs|?title}}. While providing the help he mentioned that he preferred serif fonts, because several features–like italics–look better in serif fonts.
We talked about that and he asked if there was a way to have custom CSS on Shifti. I had to admit that I had heard something about it but was not familiar with whether it was supported in the code Shifti runs on. However, I knew that I could find an answer on Wikipedia—it is, after all, the premier site of the creators of the code. After some quick research I had the answer—yes, it was supported–but I had to go turn it on. That complete I helped him figure out the proper CSS to use to change the default font that Shifti uses for him to a serif one.
And knowing that the feature could be useful, I decided to write a Help: page for it that could help people create their own, custom CSS. But please note that I am by no means an expert at technical writing, so Help:Custom css contains a very basic overview of what CSS is, how it is formatted and how to create a custom CSS file here on Shifti. Because there are several Help pages on Wikipedia about Custom CSS I didn't see a reason to duplicate their efforts here. But I also know that there are people using Shifti that are not very technical, so there is also a page for the more technical of Shifti users to share their own, unique 'hacks'—Custom CSS Hacks.
PS: There is going to be a lot of 'churn' on Shifti—mostly by me—across the next week or so as the easier to apply semantic tags are spread across Shifti. Sorry about not keeping my word about not spamming Special:RecentChanges with all kinds of 'churn' edits.
There is a new Help: page for Semantic Tags – it's going to be a work in progress, but that page should answer all your questions about how to add tags. See this page if you want to search based on Semantic Properties, though I'd recommend you wait until we get a Help: page written to explain the use of that page and the {{#ask}} tag that lets you embed semantic queries in a page.
If you want to view the semantic tags for a given page, look in the "toolbox" that is under the search-box. For pages that have semantic properties set, there will be a "Browse" link, which is a link to the Semantic Property Browsing special page that passes in a parameter so it opens the properties for the correct page.
In other news… Those of you that watch the Recent Changes page may have noticed that I did a lot of editing of numerous pages today. This was to get the {{universe}} tag spread to all pages set in a shared universe or to fix the use since the {{universe}} tag automagically generates a link to the settings Category page. This has also spread the 'setting' semantic property to all pages that were known to need it.
Notice: I will be going through the 'Stories By Author' categories sometime in the next few days to make sure pages have a {{title}} or {{byline}} at the start—except in specific cases where the author has done something specific to make it clear they don't want to use either template (Viqsi is the only one I'm positive did not use them by open choice). This will help to make sure that the Title property and the Author property are well distributed across the site.
After that is finished I will see about adding more tags to stories that I read and find need them, but I will not be doing massive, in-depth changes like this for quite a long time. After all, this is a lot of work—getting {{universe}} spread to the pages that needed it took more than three hours.
I've been chasing bugs for the last few days, but things should be working now. People linking in from external sites may be having problems, since the only way to fix the "redlink edits the existing page" problem was to go and change how the URL's are formed. This requirement was listed nowhere and the change seems to have been made with code to make sure the engine got the right 'Title' for a page. They made the assumption that people would be following the lead of Wikipedia and have 'Pretty Links' that were in the form of '/wiki/Title' and not how we've had it (with just /Title).
To get around the breakage caused by that I had to go make changes to both the servers settings and to Shifti's settings. Sorry for any problems users may have had as I struggled with making this work right.
I've updated the code on the extension that is supposed to be keeping user-pages locked down after seeing that it was, apparently, not working after the upgrade. I'm going to go back to poking, but I am hoping that this fixes that.
And we have a brand-new feature. Shifti is now running the "Semantic MediaWiki" extension. This provides so many extra features that I can't list them all myself. However... The biggest reason we decided to install this extension was that it compliments the category structure in a way that a lot of you have been begging for. That is... When it's fully rolled-out the semantic data will allow for searches that are much more specific and should help you find stories that you'd like to read even faster.
I've been informed that the upgrade seems to have broken the Captcha system. I've installed the latest version and am going to be rengenerating the actual captcha images in a few minutes. Thanks for all the patience.
Tiniest fraction of unplanned down-time today. We've got a massive wind-storm going on here and it knocked out the power for a couple of minutes. All other problems after that were because of the sad fact that the database server was never intended to run completely unattended. Sorry for the interruption in your browsing.
I've done some minor hacking and now the Title template and the Universe Template actually set semantic properties for you. These two properties - "Author" and "Universe" duplicate existing categories - but I added them to get some semantic properties onto as large a number of pages as possible. --ShadowWolf 22:53, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
Lots more hacking on templates for semantic tagging done. Recent Changes should cover the bases, but I'm planning on adding information on them to the help section - since people are going to be needing to add them to pages. But that is going to wait for another day.
Found errors in several of the properties I created. Thankfully they hadn't yet gone into use. The 'Page Type' templates (which set the 'Page type' property) and the 'TF tag' template (which sets the 'TF Type', 'TF Degree' and 'TF Species' properties) showed the errors. Thank you for patience with the Administrators who are struggling to learn a new tech to help you.
Shifti is undergoing the process of being upgraded to the latest version of the code base. Please bear with us as the ground shakes and the walls shudder. We should be done with the process in a little bit.
--ShadowWolf 00:17, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
Okay, upgrades all finished for now. We are now running the same version of the code as Wikipedia.
Lots of cleanup done in sorting out the categories. Sorry if my work on cleaning them up and getting things organized spammed anyone. As a side note this did uncover a "Stories By Genre" 'super-category' that wasn't in the menu. It's there now. To all you authors: when adding categories, don't forget the Genre :P
Lots more work on categories. This has been needed for quite a while, but nobody actually bothered to do it. Now that it's done, I'm hoping others will take up the torch and help keep things clean. Sometimes this will need an administrators access...
I've removed the extension that provided the <comments/> tag because it was being abused by spam bots (and was rarely ever used by a regular user). If you've used it on any pages, please remove it. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Old News 
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Old News 
