Teflpedia:Dev

__NEWSECTIONLINK__ Dev notes
 * Teflpedia:Dev/CategoryTree

This page outlines Teflpedia technical development.

Suggestions are welcome here.

Bob M and Roger, both mostly point and click computer users, minimize Teflpedia's technical issues by hosting Teflpedia on a shared Web-hosting account at Dathorn.com on MediaWiki software developed and maintained by the good open source software developers at http://mediawiki.org. Roger gets into the PHP code on the server as seldom as possible.

Layout

 * http://dfcb.github.com/Responsivator/?site=teflpedia.com Teflpedia seen at various window sizes. You can see the same sort of thing by resizing your own browser window.

Server response

 * RTT = round trip time, or round-trip delay time (RTD), time it takes for a signal to be sent plus the length of time it takes for an acknowledgment of that signal to be received.
 * TTL = time to live, hops a packet can travel before being discarded or returned.
 * MTU = maximum transmission unit, size of the largest packet.

Free response time testing

 * Gotsitemonitor -- Gotsitemonitor checks Teflpedia every 5 minutes
 * Alertra -- multinational test points
 * Websitepulse -- choice of New York NY, Munich Germany, or Melbourne Australia test points
 * test behind China firewall
 * Globalcrossing-Level3

Internet overall status

 * Internet Traffic Report
 * Keynote

2014 Feb 22 -- MediaWiki 1.22.2 upgrade
Roger upgraded Teflpedia to MediaWiki 1.22.2.

2013 Feb 10 -- MediaWiki 1.20.2 upgrade
Roger put the parts in place today, Feb 9. Estimate upgrade for tomorrow, Feb 10.

Site will be temporarily READ ONLY (~10 minutes) sometime tomorrow, during the upgrade.

2012 Dec 3 -- Fixed "Debate" namespace
I read details at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces and fixed the "Debate" namespace. I moved all eleven (4 are redirects) debate pages out of "Debate" namespace, then fixed the LocalSettings.php errant space (changed "Debate " to "Debate"), then moved all the eleven (4 are redirects) debate pages back into the correctly configured "Debate" namespace. One immediate benefit is that the "Debate" namespace is now searchable, which it wasn't with the errant configuration. All fixed. --Roger 22:03, 3 December 2012 (CST)

2012 Feb -- MediaWiki 1.18.1 upgrade
Moved here from Teflpedia:Teachers' room

Hi friends, Bob and I are jointly administrating Teflpedia as of Feb 4, 2012. Bob is still the man in charge, if anyone is on a wiki. Someone's got to own the project; that's Bob. And I know how to tweak MediaWiki some. So I volunteered to help with stuff like upgrades and tweaks. Spammers were taking advantage of weaknesses in our old version of MediaWiki. So I upgraded Teflpedia to the new MediaWiki 1.18.1 and tweaked some settings that have stopped the robot spam. QuestyCaptcha is what is doing that for us; it's not fancy, just asks you some easy questions when you register or post a link. Oh, and on the [https://forums.dathorn.com/showthread.php?3811-Our-New-Hosting-Infrastructure! Dathorn server] we now have 10GB monthly data transfer limit instead of our former 2GB. So pass the word to your teacher friends: Teflpedia is the encyclopedia of English teaching! And see if you can stir them to create some Teflpedia pages about their very own favorite teaching tricks and activities, or contribute a favorite lesson idea, or join a debate. Cheers! :-) --Roger 00:58, 12 February 2012 (CST)

Testing 123
I've been slightly concerned for some time now 'bout the aesthetics of that hanging word that appears on some templates, e.g. Template:Welcome, and thought that it might look better like this: Template:Welcome/Testing. In this particular case, it still takes up the same number of lines, but makes the page a bit less wonky-like/lopsided. If it don't meet with too much opposition from the powers-that-B, there are a couple of other templates out there somewhere (can't remember, offhand, which ones) that could be tweaked whenever we come across 'em. Regs., --Technopat (talk) 17:57, 10 April 2013 (CDT)


 * Thanks Pat. I fixed it. Please note the powers that B deprecated the Center tag years ago. We don't want to use it. We don't want to center that message, either; left aligned text gives a more readable text block. If you are fretting about a lone word appearing on the last line by itself, put a non-breaking space between it and the word that precedes it. But normally a lone word wrapped onto a line by itself is not a problem worth fixing. --Roger (talk) 22:34, 10 April 2013 (CDT)
 * 'Kay. I agrees that left-aligned text is where it's at for "normal" text, but for one liners like the above it don't look right, except when I augment my screen, that is. Thanks for that tip about nbsp: I only use it for figures and initials/abbreviations - it had never occurred to me to use it with words/sentences :) Cheers!

Reflist
Greetings All. Any chance of swapping the current for ? Reason I ask is that I'd like to be able to do a {{Reflist|2]} over at Suffix. Not only for purely aesthetic reasons, but also 'cos it saves a couple o' nanoseconds, and they all add up. Cheers! --Technopat (talk) 20:01, 5 May 2013 (CDT)
 * I don't understand what you are proposing. What would a parameter value "2" be supposed to do? Maybe you could just try creating the template you propose and see if you like what it does? Is there a template on another wiki you want to emulate? --Roger (talk) 01:05, 6 May 2013 (CDT)
 * On the mother of all wikis, divides the list of footnotes into 2 columns; , into 3 columns, etc. Not many pages over here warrant it, but the above page, already too much of a list, for my liking, could be tweaked to make it more pleasing to the eye. I'll see if I can get round to it later, but in terms of efficient use of human resources, your input would be more effective :) (...or should those adjectives be the other way round?) Cheers! --Technopat (talk) 09:12, 6 May 2013 (CDT)


 * Oh, I see. Hm, after looking that template over I think it is a bit overkill for teflpedia. I think the single column references list is good for our purposes. I suggest we avoid unnecessary complexity there. Actually, the single column displays better on mobile devices and I think that may be a reason not to change it. --Roger (talk) 16:49, 6 May 2013 (CDT)

Disk quota
The Teflpedia Mediawiki database has grown to 908.19 MB. That may or may not be out of the ordinary. However it is almost half our current 2 GB disk limit. The database plus our other 675.06 MB of files leave us only 417 MB of free disk space, which is less than comfortable room to maneuver. I can increase our disk quota if necessary. Let's keep an eye on this. Roger (talk) 19:23, 3 September 2013 (CDT)

Okay, I have increased disc quota to 3 GB. That gives comfortable room to maneuver. Let's keep an eye on the database size, in case it is growing faster than expected. Roger (talk) 22:30, 3 September 2013 (CDT)

Okay, I set disk quota to 4 GB. I want the extra room for backups. Roger (talk) 23:24, 4 September 2013 (CDT)

Database is back down to expected size now, per maintenance done. Objectcache table in the database apparently is not being flushed. So I flushed it by running the update.php maintenance script. This thread on Mediawiki-l has details (cycle through "Next message" links on that thread to read the various replies). Roger (talk) 20:28, 5 September 2013 (CDT)