12bit Blog

Announcing Super Multi Notes

Posted by taizou at 2015-04-23 02:13:25 Site news

Some of you may have noticed the lack of posts here since, ooh, a year ago. A large part of the reason for that is I don’t like writing a blog post about a thing unless I can cover the thing totally comprehensively, which always feels like a huge undertaking when it’s something like a console with 200 games built in, and I’ve decided I want to take a screenshot of every single one of them, delve into the history of the company that made it, take photos of it from every angle and do a bunch of other stuff on top of that. But with that coupled to my limited free time lately, it just seems overwhelming and I end up never doing it. Which is not ideal! Because I think this stuff is interesting and I want to share my knowledge about it with the world - I don’t want to turn into some cranky old dude with an attic full of weird shit that nobody else knows or cares about. I want to turn into some cranky old dude with an attic full of weird shit that a handful of people on the internet know about!

To that end, I’m launching my new project - unimaginatively called Super Multi Notes, because I literally can’t name things for shit - which is basically a single-editor wiki for my own discoveries, notes, pictures and other stuff. The idea behind this is, when I find something interesting, I can immediately create a page for it there with some basic details - instead of putting it aside for a blog post I will never write - and flesh out the article later, as and when I have time to do so (or when I make relevant new discoveries). Like any wiki, every page will always be a work in progress, and some will no doubt reach more advanced stages of progress than others; it’s entirely possible some will consist solely of a title followed by "uuuuugh" and/or a string of random characters and/or expletives. But at least you’ll have that title!

It's running on MediaWiki software (as used by Wikipedia, Wikia and like 98% of other wikis) with the Semantic MediaWiki extension installed, which will hopefully allow me to make more interesting use of data than I could otherwise. It's also using a completely new theme; this is still very much in beta, so please let me know if you encounter any problems or have any feedback.

While (for now at least) I’ll be the only person allowed to edit the wiki pages proper, anyone is welcome to leave comments on articles or edit discussion pages. I’m also releasing the whole thing under a Creative Commons license, so you can reuse the content in other wikis or sites, provided you give credit.

Does all that mean this blog is dead? I hope not! I just have to decide what I want to do with it now. Maybe I’ll highlight interesting things from the wiki here, or use it for more in-depth articles that don’t really lend themselves to wiki format, or something else entirely. But whatever I do or don’t do with this blog, hopefully the wiki will be an experiment that pays off.

6 Comments

Comments

1Posted by Friedslick6 at 2015-04-28 10:01:44

Nice, I think a wiki is a more appropriate format for these kinds of information.

2Posted by ? at 2015-05-26 06:32:09

Cool. Whatever works for you, man. I've long felt like such a wiki is the only way I could gather thoughts that would otherwise be scattered across a half-dozen sites, but I'm way too lazy to set one up. Your wiki seems to load somewhat slowly and strangely, but it might just be due to the older hardware i'm usually using. Hope spam bots don't keep bugging you.

3Posted by taizou at 2015-06-14 00:18:41

sorry to hear it's slow for you - client-side it should work okay on older hardware (I hope?), it's not really heavy on javascript or anything (at least no more than any other mediawiki-based wiki, i haven't added any of my own). server side it can be pretty slow sometimes, mediawiki is a beast of a thing (especially with semantic mediawiki installed on top of it) but i have a bunch of caching enabled which hopefully should mitigate it.. let me know if you still have problems though.

4Posted by taizou at 2015-06-16 21:24:12

ugh the caching it's using seems to be conflicting with Semantic MediaWiki now.. which can cause the wiki to completely break (ie blank page/500 error on every page) until the web server is restarted. which is not exactly ideal. but yeah if you see it not working for a while, that's probably the reason. hopefully i can resolve this in some way that doesnt involve disabling one of those two things.

5Posted by ? at 2019-08-22 10:45:03

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name='$name'";

6Posted by taizou at 2019-08-27 22:23:48

lol nice try