User talk:Bryan

After the chat we had about the limitations of the internal search system of MediaWiki I took a look at wikimedia for search extensions. "Lucene Search" seemed to be the best bet, but after fighting to get the backend for it built and installed I learned it wasn't any better than the built-in system. (In truth, its worse. No ability to select additional namespaces to search in, requires manual dumping of the database and importing into the backend for indexing, etc...) All the code is there to support it, though. However I've shut down the search daemon and disabled the extension. I'm going to go back to poking at the MediaWiki internals to see if I can change the default search to include the User namespace. ShadowWolf 21:22, 21 July 2007 (EDT)

When Wikipedia's under extreme load it shuts down the internal search engine to conserve resources and instead present a wrapper for a Google search limited to the wikipedia.org server, perhaps you could use something like that? Wouldn't work until Google started spidering us, which I don't know if they've done yet, but with MediaWiki's search as poor as it is it may be an improvement. Bryan 02:42, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

There are several extensions on MetaWiki for Google searches. As far as I can tell from the stats page Google has started the indexing process. (look down under the "bots" section). I'll get to work doing the reorg so Category:Author points to author homepages and Category:Stories By Author is the stories themselves. (It's better if we stay ahead of the curve, no?) ShadowWolf 13:13, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Sure, though staying behind the curve also has its advantages (we'll know more about what the organization of Shifti actually looks like :). I'd advise lowercase titles for pages and categories where possible, BTW, it makes them more natural to link to. Bryan 13:18, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Now you tell me. I've already gone and finished the reorg. How about I put together a few templates to somewhat automate the categorization and linking process? ShadowWolf 13:39, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

If you like, though I don't really see the point of turning [[Category:Author]] into {{Category author}} and such. I'll convert over the category to lower case, I'm used to doing that sort of thing over on Wikipedia. Bryan 13:49, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

I was thinking more along the lines of {{AuthorPage}} adding [[Category:(Author Name)]] to the {{Title}} template. No need to go crazy with stuff like that. ShadowWolf 14:04, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

A potential gotcha you might run into: If you put {{PAGENAME}} on a template, it resolves as the template's page name. So every author page could wind up categorized in Category:AuthorPage. You'd probably need to take the category name as a parameter, or ask that every user substitute the template rather than transclude it (if you use "{{subst:template name}}" instead of just "{{template name}}" the text of the template page is inserted directly into the article the moment you click "save"). I'm also not a fan of categories in templates because it makes it impossible to use the template elsewhere (such as on a help page describing its usage) without incorrectly categorizing the other pages it appears in. I really think we're not a big enough wiki yet to be worrying much about this, I'm capable of cleaning everything up manually. It only took me two minutes to switch everything over from Stories By Author to stories by author. :)