TakeoKatsuki

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Email: <takeo.katsuki AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com>

Me and MoinMoin

I have been using and running MoinMoin wiki as an office intranet since Feb 2009, and I think MoinMoin is absolutely fascinating. Thanks to the developers.

Questions/Requests

These are my small questions and requests that might be still too trivial or too preliminary to be put on the FeatureRequests. Any of your help is appreciated!

Current questions/requests

• Some files with Japanese characters in their names cannot be attached.

   UnicodeDecodeError
   'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 19-21: invalid data

  Once this error appears, the page becomes inaccessible. To rescue the page, the attached file must be manually removed from the attachments folder, and the last line in the edit-log file must also be removed.

  • This is known and there are bug reports for this. It maybe can work if your (file)system encoding is utf-8. Fixing this would need major changes in AttachFile and other parts of moin, so we decided to fix that in moin 2.0 (please use ascii filenames until then).

    • Thanks for your consideration for non-ascii characters. I've read MoinMoinBugs/Non-ASCII attachment names on Windows. It is great to hear that moin 2.0 will support these characters in filenames, but till then is it somehow possible to avoid sticking into an error page? For example, how about checking the filename before processing the attachment action, and if non-ascii characters (or only invalid ascii characters) are found, going back to the uploading page with a warning such as "Use ascii character for filename"? Another simple (but not very effective?) idea may be to display a message that recommends the use of ascii filenames in the upload page itself if user's language setting is non-ascii. I myself never use Japanese characters for any filenames, but I see many others do, and I am afraid that they get puzzled if they find the error and the page being inaccessible. Full support is the best solution, but non-support maybe safer than sticking into a dead end (the error page) that can only be taken care at the server end. Forwarded to MoinMoinBugs/Non-ASCII attachment names on Windows

• Why is wiki syntax not allowed in headings? I am asking this not because I need more prettiness or better navigation, but because it is simply incorrect to use unitalicized letters for name of species or name of genes in the field of biology, for example.

• As someone has posted on the MonthCalendar page, it would be great if Next Day / Previous Day links are automatically added into the daily pages. I use MonthCalendar as my business calendar and I frequently go back and forth between different daily pages. In such a case, it would be really helpful if one can navigate across pages without having to go back to the calendar page and find the day of interest every time. I think this kind of feature is fairly common in calendar and blog services. Forwarded to FeatureRequests/MonthCalendarNextPreviousDay

• I like MoinMoin's thorough revision history control. In addition to (or even instead of) the history_count parameter, an interface something like the following may further help navigate through the history without increasing traffic.

  << 0-100 < Show > 200-300 >>
  or
  Show 100- | 200- | 300- | 400- | 500- | >>
  or
  page selection by entering a page number. Forwarded to FeatureRequests/ShowFullRevisionHistory.

• Double clicking shortcut to open an edit page is useful. It might be even more useful if the editor shows the clicked region rather than the top of the page. If this is achieved, you don't have to scroll down all the way to find the location you are going to edit. Section editing will be another option to achieve this. This was already requested in FeatureRequests/AutoScrollingTheEditorTextArea

• Can target="_blank" option be used for thumbnails? For example,

   [[attachment:image.bmp|{{attachment:image.bmp|alt text|width=200}}]]

  does work, but

   [[attachment:image.bmp|{{attachment:image.bmp|alt text|width=200}}|target="_blank"]]

  doesn't seem to work. I wish it works. Forwarded to FeatureRequests/ThumbnailTargetBlank

• How do I make unified diff for a code? Mercurial seems to be a way...
  • hg diff, or diff .urN
  • man diff
  • First I have to learn what Mercurial is all about...

    • http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/~foozy/fujiguruma/scm/mercurial.html (Japanese)

    • http://mono.kmc.gr.jp/~mak/hiki/?Mercurial%A4%CB%A4%C4%A4%A4%A4%C6 (Japanese)

Solved questions/requests

• How do I configure the default time zone that is given on the preference page of the users?

  • tz_offset, see HelpOnConfiguration

    • Thank you so much for your help, Thomas. Adding tz_offset = 9.0 to wikiconfig.py worked. But this only works for new users. Wouldn't it be nice if the default setting is "Default", and the "Default" time be specified in the wikiconfig, rather than default setting being UTC? With such system, correcting wikiconfig corrects the default time setting of all users.
• How do I configure the Server time that is given on the preference page?
  • iirc, server time is always shown as UTC
    • OK, so it is not a problem that this server time doesn't match the time of my server computer, is it?
    • It should show the server time as UTC time. If your server's local time is UTC+9, it likely shows localtime minus 9 hours.
    • Yes, it shows localtime minus 9 hours.
• Is there anyway to send a message or an alert to me when a page of my interest on the wiki is updated? Notification? Jabber?

  • see HelpOnNotification

    • HelpOnConfiguration/EmailSupport using Gmail SMTP worked by setting my wikiconfig.py something like in this way: mail_smarthost = "smtp.gmail.com:587" mail_from = u"wikiname <noreply@wikiname.wiki>" mail_login = "gmail.account@gmail.com password". Here a problem is that it takes some time to send a notification through the gmail server, and thus takes more time to complete a Save Changes action. Somehow "smtp.gmail.com:465" didn't work.

• How can I automatically insert a timestamp of the time that I edit a page? I thought that <<DateTime>> macro would do it but it displays the current time not the time of the past...

  • OK, SIG variable does this. Cool. HelpOnVariables

• How can I use Greek alphabets?
  • OK, we can simply copy them from a character code table. 10 µm ± 5 ⇒ λα, etc. Good.
• Is this a bug? Linebreak doesn't work when the first letter of the word prior to a colon is capitalized. Example:

  AB:C<<BR>>aB:C Ab:C<<BR>>ab:C

  Forwarded to MoinMoinBugs/LinebreakFailsAfterColon.

Projects/Requests of my interest

• FeatureRequests/FeatureRequestsIncludeFromTo

• MoinMoinBugs/Non-ASCII attachment names on Windows

• FeatureRequests/MonthCalendarNextPreviousDay

• FeatureRequests/AutoScrollingTheEditorTextArea

• FeatureRequests/ThumbnailTargetBlank

My tips

Generating large tables with wiki syntax

Suppose you have a fairly large spread sheet data (e.g. Excel) that you want to transfer to your wiki. Using CSV parser is one of the ways to achieve it without typing lots of ||s; however, all of the useful wiki syntax is ignored in CSV parser. Here is my way to generate large tables with wiki syntax:

1. Insert columns of || using Excel.

2. Replace line breaks with <<BR>>. A line break is Ctrl+J.

3. Save the file in a unicode (.txt) format.
4. Open the file with a text editor and remove "(quotation) by replacing it with nothing.
5. Copy and paste the data to your wiki.

Customizing MonthCalendar color

Subpages

Memo

http://code.google.com/p/emoji4unicode/

Messages to Me

Please leave messages to me here... Thanks.

Please forward Questions to MoinMoinQuestions. -- ReimarBauer 2009-06-26 21:26:33

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