He's currently visiting New Zealand and is doing a series of lectures. Today the Organic Design team went to the University of Auckland to attend his lecture on free software and digital restrictions management. He explained that the copyright system we have in place today was designed in a time when only publishing companies could afford to print material and that it was never intended to impede the ability for individuals to share information amongst themselves. Further than this he states that to deliberately impede a society's ability to share information and knowledge is immoral and should not be tolerated by the people.
PayPal used to be an excellent alternative to the whole credit industry for online payments, but then it got bought by the huge eBay corporation in 2002, and by 2007 had achieved the status of a proper bank in many countries. Now it's charges and fees are much higher and requires its users to have a credit card linked to their account or it will become frozen and unusable. However, it's still one of the most widely accepted and useful online payment solutions.
Until recently this new credit card requirement was a problem for NZ customers who couldn't obtain one due to a bad credit-rating. But now we have some local debit card options such as the Visa "Loaded" card which you can get from any NZ Post Shop (take two forms of ID and $16.50 with you). It's a normal credit card but with zero credit (i.e. it's prepaid), but it still links to your name and address like a normal Visa card so you can use it to get a proper verified PayPal account.
I recently applied for a Loaded card and today I successfully used it to verify my PayPal account. Once you're a verified PayPal user, you have no limit to how much you can receive, send or transfer and you can enable other useful features such as the ability to accept credit card payments on your site, instead of only being able to accept payments from other PayPal users.
For some reason we've been ranking really highly for a quite a few keywords, but we haven't ever paid attention to meta-tags or any other ranking factors. Here's a list of some Google searches for which we appear on the first page (some of them number 1!) or have done in the past.
We've recently started moving many of our extension code into the MediaWiki Subversion (SVN) repository so that their development can benefit from the input of all those working on the main code-base and other extension developers who take an interest.
This has already proved to be a very productive move, for example, the EmailArticle extension was moved across one month ago today and has already been internationalised and messages fully translated for 14 new languages; Arabic, Bulgarian, Esperanto, French, Galician, Luxembourgish, Malayalam, Marathi, Dutch, Norwegian, Occitan, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese!
The CurrentPages extension (code) is basically a hit counter recording the number of normal page views to each article. The difference between this extension and the normal popular pages special-page is that this only records the hits for the last 24 hours. It creates a new table called currentpages_hourlyviews in the wiki database to store the information in.
Today we've changed the skin from a WikiSkin based skin to a normal MediaWiki skin. If your skin is not showing up like the screenshot to the right, then set it to "OrganicDesign" in your preferences.
OrganicDesign has gone through a few other skins over the last few years which are shown below. Click on any of the images to see them at 1:1 resolution.
We've recently started moving our most stable and popular extensions into the MediaWiki SVN repository, so that they can evolve through the collaboration of the main developers of the MediaWiki project. We've also started developing the main MediaWiki code-base to allow support for the SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server database engines. Below is a list of the extensions we've moved into SVN.
I was wondering how many of the SVN committers are active and how often, so I made a PERL script to read in all the commits (svn-report.pl) and another (svn-results.pl) to format the results into monthly totals as shown below. The core commits are those changes made to the MediaWiki code-base (the phase3 branch) rather than those made to other areas of the repository such as extension code. The resulting statistics are in the MediaWiki SVN Statistics article.
I've needed to create parser-functions a number of times which allow the rendering of dynamic menu's. Each time I've created a specific extension for the job and have used code from TreeView to achieve it, so finally I bit the bullet and merged the best JavaScript dynamic menu I've found (Sons of Suckerfish) into the TreeView code base, and renamed the extension from TreeView5 to TreeAndMenu.
The TreeAndMenu extension allows bullet lists to be rendered as folder trees or dynamic drop-down menu's. It has been tested successfully on MediaWiki versions 1.6.10, 1.8.4, 1.9.3, 1.10.2, 1.11.0 and 1.12.0. And is known to work on Safari, IE6, IE7 and all Mozilla based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey.
Screenshot showing a tree on the left and a dynamic drop-down menu on the right
This bug affects Organic Design because our servers are Debian and workstations Ubuntu, but all have been updated now and the compromised keys regenerated. The problem affected the MediaWiki SVN users as well because it uses SSH keys for authentication, so anyone's keys that were generated on affected systems had to be replaced including ours.
