River Writes - A MediaWiki Blog

Glossary of ambiguous terms

river — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:21:00 +0000

Template and Preload are different, as are Widget, Module, and Gadget. Here’s a small glossary

Everything about cargo_attach

river — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 23:50:34 +0000

What does #cargo_attach do? How do you use it? And more

snake_case in Cargo sucks

river — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:11:42 +0000

Cargo will sometimes confusingly change your underscores to spaces if you use snake_case in your field names, so please don’t do that

Gluing & framing a 9000-piece jigsaw

river — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:13:51 +0000

How I glued Ravensburger’s 9000-piece Dragon Forest puzzle

How to fix Alt+Shift+S

river — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 18:17:47 +0000

Edge interferes with the Alt+Shift+S hotkey, here’s how to fix it

Pink Water Lilies timelapse

river — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 01:49:47 +0000

A timelapse of solving Ravensburger Pink Water Lilies 4000 piece puzzle

ParserPower, argmap, and iargmap

river — Wed, 28 May 2025 23:45:10 +0000

My talk from MediaWiki Users and Developers Workshop Spring 2025 in Sandusky, Ohio

Bookmark keywords, again

river — Thu, 22 May 2025 18:50:37 +0000

How & why I use bookmark keywords and bookmarklets for searching in Firefox

How to see your template edits in action

river — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 18:27:36 +0000

When you edit a template, you will need to bypass cache somehow to see the effect of that edit on a content page

Books published in 2024 (part 2)

river — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 06:40:19 +0000

Mini reviews of fiction published in 2024, part 2!

Books I read that were published in 2024

river — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 05:33:09 +0000

Mini reviews of fiction published in 2024

How to join the Wikipedia Discord

river — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 22:49:19 +0000

Click here if you want to join the Wikipedia Discord server!

The Tag That Shall Not Be Named

river — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 01:31:04 +0000

A quick post about transclusion, partial transclusion, The Tag That Shall Not Be Named, and whitespace

A Great Comet live performance review

river — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 03:58:50 +0000

I saw Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 live, and I have THOUGHTS (it was incredible!)

What I have learned about 3D printing

river — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 14:22:56 +0000

I started 3D printing and I do not recommend it as a hobby

Give people early successes

river — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:47:26 +0000

Someone was wrong on the internet and I’ve taught basic coding to a lot of self-described non-developers

How to refresh cache in MediaWiki

river — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 06:19:54 +0000

Caching can be super complicated in MediaWiki because there are many different types of cache. This article goes over what to do for each kind.

mwclient 0.11

river — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 09:20:10 +0000

mwclient 0.11 has released!

How to make Moorish 8-4

river — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 04:32:31 +0000

A tutorial for Moorish 8-4, a chainmaille weave I designed in 2016

Please use recentchanges

river — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 02:05:16 +0000

The page MediaWiki:Sidebar is powered by other interface messages, use them!

Representing one-to-many relations

river — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 06:52:00 +0000

Several examples of video game mechanics that could be represented as one-to-many relations and how to do table design & queries

Introducing the SORCERER example wiki

river — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:03:54 +0000

Enjoy beautiful mspaint drawings and learn Cargo!

Notes on "Charlatan" by Pope Brock

river — Tue, 28 May 2024 00:16:37 +0000

John R. Brinkley is a fascinating historical figure whose biography feels too improbable to be true.

Notes on The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

river — Thu, 23 May 2024 18:47:22 +0000

Some tables & lists of Wikipedia links that may help you while reading this fantastic book on the events leading up to World War I

What's up with Variables and Parsoid?

river — Fri, 03 May 2024 22:16:47 +0000

What you need to know about Parsoid development as it affects Extension:Variables

Book Review - Building a StoryBrand

river — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 06:36:00 +0000

A review of and some notes on “Building a StoryBrand”

Gadget - Copy title

river — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 01:43:27 +0000

A gadget that provides one-click buttons to copy the title or (or pageName) of a MediaWiki page

Style your code blocks with Pygments

river — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 03:02:39 +0000

Customizing your view-page syntax highlighting in MediaWiki

Markdown vs Wikitext

river — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 10:14:17 +0000

An at-a-glance guide to formatting Wikitext vs Markdown

One-to-many tables & #vardefine

river — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:38:19 +0000

#vardefine doesn’t always play nice with the order in which you need to evaluate code. Here are some solutions.

Send me your wiki-updating scripts!

river — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 05:11:56 +0000

Contribute to my list of resources for editing MediaWiki with code

Dealing with defaults

river — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 11:20:30 +0000

There are a lot of different things you can mean when you say “default parameter” in MediaWiki. This article explains them all.

How to install Sublime Text & Mediawiker

river — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 14:05:13 +0000

A step-by-step guide with screenshots on installing and configuring Sublime Text with the Mediawiker extension

If {{NAMESPACE}} do nothing, otherwise...

river — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:34:28 +0000

A common design pattern in MediaWiki templating is to write {{#if:{{NAMESPACE}}||}}

Book Review - The Field Guide to Global Payments

river — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 07:15:58 +0000

A review of “A Field Guide to Global Payments,” including a table of initialisms used in the book.

Ordering a Cargo field

river — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 18:02:20 +0000

How can you enforce a sorting order on a Cargo field when displaying tabular data?

ShareX image effects

river — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 16:40:47 +0000

How to use ShareX image effects & spam your friends with rainbows

How to use Weblate

river — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 02:34:59 +0000

A guide to using Weblate as a translator

How to use Dev Tools

river — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 20:52:47 +0000

Learn how to edit CSS interactively

Surfaces with pentominoes

river — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 01:18:07 +0000

Embedding a grid on a surface doesn’t really work, but we can approximate.

Serialization woes

river — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 06:29:07 +0000

My journey of encoding pentominoes on surfaces into permalinks

I don't like infoboxes - EMWCon 2023

river — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:02:30 +0000

I attended EMWCon 2023 remotely again in 2023 and finally gave the presentation everyone has been waiting for: I don’t like infoboxes.

List-type fields, for realsies

river — Sat, 20 May 2023 23:06:27 +0000

What are list-type fields? What aren’t they? How do I query them?

Mediawiker 3.6.14

river — Sat, 20 May 2023 06:25:55 +0000

SublimeText extension Mediawiker 3.6.14 release update, plus some bonuses

Book review - Everybody Writes

river — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:31:15 +0000

“Everybody Writes” was deeply disappointing to me because it wasn’t the book I wanted to read. That said, I think it can be a valuable resource for people who want an introductory and accessible writing book.

How I found four marketing books

river — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 02:08:55 +0000

Subtitle: I dropped my keys - no, I mean bouncy balls - no, I mean information - in the light and learned to stop looking for it in the dark: An information-seeking parable

Paste a transparent-background image with PIL

river — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 19:20:21 +0000

How to paste a transparent-background image file over another file using PIL, or WTF is a mask and how does it work?

Fandom update

river — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 14:08:07 +0000

An update on my time with Leaguepedia.

Book review - Recoding Gender

river — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:54:30 +0000

A review of the book “Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing”

Lua Branches

river — Tue, 31 May 2022 10:05:34 +0000

Lua Branches is a prototype/proof-of-concept MediaWiki extension for making branches of Lua modules & their dependency chains.

Live I18n

river — Tue, 17 May 2022 01:52:39 +0000

I wrote my second-ever MediaWiki extension!

Handling internal data in MediaWiki

river — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 05:27:42 +0000

My EMWCon 2022 talk

How to crosslink two Hugo blogs

river — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 04:50:12 +0000

My misadventures accomplishing what should have been a really easy task in Hugo

CustomLogs 1.0

river — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 04:50:09 +0000

Custom Logs 1.0 has been released!

Lua table errors

river — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 06:28:24 +0000

A framework for inserting Lua errors into HTML tables using a singleton class

Toggleable columns

river — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 22:07:12 +0000

A simple interface to automatically let users toggle columns in any data table on the entire wiki.

Serving Hugo from a non-root location with Nginx

river — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 02:29:20 +0000

How to host a Hugo blog from a non-root location

Organize your Hugo content folder by year, without affecting any URLs

river — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 04:18:45 +0000

How to organize your Hugo content folder into subfolders by year without affecting any URLs

Book review - Foundations of Library and Information Science

river — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 08:20:41 +0000

A review of “Foundations of Library and Information Science”

How to find a namespace number

river — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:28:29 +0000

Here’s how you can find the number of a particular namespace

Make lots of sandbox pages

river — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 23:41:34 +0000

Instead of putting all of your code experiments on a single page, make lots of little sandbox pages!

How to set up Sphinx for Read the Docs

river — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:54:37 +0000

A tutorial for configuring Sphinx for Read the Docs for your Python projects

mwcleric, my Python MediaWiki client library

river — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 06:21:26 +0000

An overview of mwcleric

Book review - The Elements of User Experience

river — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 07:17:38 +0000

A review of “The Elements of User Experience”

Mouse Gestures (the useful ones)

river — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 05:06:54 +0000

My Gesturefy bindings in Firefox and how I use them when working with MediaWiki

Book review - Free to All

river — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 04:26:12 +0000

A review and chapter summaries of “Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920”

I stored a boolean instead of a timestamp

river — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 01:16:32 +0000

A Cargo field I was going to store as a timestamp but decided to store as a boolean instead

Book review - Celebration, U.S.A.

river — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:49:11 +0000

A review of “Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town”

Book review - Library as Place

river — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 10:07:18 +0000

A review of “The Library as Place: History, Community, and Culture”

MediaWiki hotkeys (the useful ones)

river — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:15:21 +0000

A list of just the useful hotkeys/access keys in MediaWiki

Book review & notes - Looking for Information

river — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 20:33:43 +0000

A review of, including chapter-by-chapter notes on, “Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior”

Book review - Strategic Writing for UX

river — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 03:50:07 +0000

A review of “Strategic Writing for UX”

Gadget - Copy search results

river — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 13:33:46 +0000

Similar to the copy category members gadget, but for search results - and more!

Book review - Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings

river — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 05:44:26 +0000

A review of “Writing and Designing Manuals and Warnings, Fifth Edition”

Bracket zoom bug

river — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 21:16:24 +0000

A quick CSS bugfix that was particularly satisfying - and interesting!

Gadget - Copy category members

river — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:13:09 +0000

A gadget to copy all members of a category

Frame, wtf?

river — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:46:02 +0000

Frame objects in Scribunto can be confusing, and they do a lot of work. Normally I say “don’t worry, just copy the copyable code,” but here’s an indepth guide to everything they do.

Book notes - OSTEP (part 3)

river — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 05:16:48 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 3, Persistence

Book notes - OSTEP (part 2)

river — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 11:07:21 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 2, Concurrency

Book notes - OSTEP (part 1)

river — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 22:50:55 +0000

My notes on “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” - part 1, Virtualization

Book review - Microcopy

river — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:08:32 +0000

A review of “Microcopy: The Complete Guide”

Gadget - Top-of-page categories

river — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:27:26 +0000

A gadget to show categories at the top of pages

Bookmarklet - stay here

river — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:38:23 +0000

A bookmarklet that enables a prompt before navigating away from your current location

Comment your closing braces

river — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 05:22:52 +0000

This one trick will save you 80% of your wikitext debugging time!

Optimizing Cargo - query 3

river — Tue, 25 May 2021 22:07:05 +0000

The final of three Cargo queries I recently optimized on Leaguepedia

Book review - Developing Quality Technical Information

river — Sat, 22 May 2021 09:37:18 +0000

A review of the book “Developing Quality Technical Information: A Handbook for Writers and Editors”

Sublime Text 4 is released!

river — Thu, 20 May 2021 03:46:13 +0000

Sublime Text 4 has been released!

My EMWCon 2021 talk

river — Thu, 13 May 2021 03:52:11 +0000

At EMWCon 2021, I gave a talk about easily performing tasks with Python on MediaWiki wikis.

Optimizing Cargo - query 2

river — Tue, 04 May 2021 22:06:58 +0000

The second of three Cargo queries I recently optimized.

Optimizing Cargo - query 1

river — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 02:05:43 +0000

A Cargo query I optimized recently on Leaguepedia

mwparserfromhell 0.6

river — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 01:15:08 +0000

mwparserfromhell released version 0.6 a couple months ago with a couple really exciting changes!

A Lua module to print all args

river — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 11:24:05 +0000

How to write a module to print all args to help with debugging Cargo

Tournament brackets (part 1)

river — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 06:36:44 +0000

Our CSS-grid-powered tournament brackets on Leaguepedia

Setting common match & game keys

river — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 02:33:50 +0000

How I corrected a mistake in my Cargo database design

Reinstalling Windows

river — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 08:46:12 +0000

I reinstalled Windows this month. As usual, it was a pretty arduous process, so let’s document what I did to make it suck less next time!

Use cases for Extension:CustomLogs

river — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 02:33:50 +0000

Use cases for my extension CustomLogs

Escape item["id"]

river — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:59:37 +0000

A funny commit I made today

Gadget - Improving Special:ListGroupRights CSS

river — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:43:00 +0000

A couple lines of CSS to improve the user experience of Special:ListGroupRights

Books I read in 2019

river — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:59:57 +0000

A list of books I read in 2019

Books I read in 2020

river — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 22:18:30 +0000

A list of books I read in 2020