Scope WIKI: scopedia.net

[valis]

Scopedia.net, the unofficial Scope WIKI is located at:
http://www.scopedia.net/

Currently the site is *in development* status and so is not accessible from the main url, please use:
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/

All Scope (and PlanetZ) users are encouraged to contribute any input & content that fits within the Scope (sic) of the wiki!

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Next post has current 'to do' list (mostly things *I* need to do still)

[valis]

Things to do (in vague order of priority, will add to this as things come up):
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- Improve site performance (see here & here) as its VERY slow atm
- Improve site security/permissions
- setup usergroups (based on above permissions)
- assign a few Bureaucrats (moderators) - netguyjoel & ben walker seem to be safe candidates atm, anyone else interested?
- decide what uploads/directory accesses to allow for users, bots & Bureaucrats
- Improve templating (for now) & logo
- Decide if we want LaTeX/TeX support (formulas)?
- continue to rtfm (for mediawiki, see here)

[FrancisHarmany]

Hi Valis,

One thing you might want to concider is serving static contect with something
like ngnix. I dont know if you can seperate static content to a differnt hostname.
Then it would be easy. I've configured many reverse proxies with squid so if
you need help there....

[valis]

What I was thinking of was serving cached content to unregisterd/logged in visitors and getting the logged in pageviews down to 40ms or less by making as many of the defined variables static data instead. But I'm all ears

In fact if anyone wanted to help administer the site I'd be willing to give access to one or maybe 2 others. I will get there myself but it might be slow, as I tend to do things in blocks. But if someone has experience enough to help configure things and is well known enough here that I wouldn't have to worry about the integrity of the site then I have no particular need to 'own' this myself.

My only aim is to try to facilitate a wiki as I have wished to have some place to put my textdumps about particular things in the past, it tends to get hard to repeat the same things at great length when the older posts have 'disappeared' into the archives.

[FrancisHarmany]

I can help on the backend.

We could check the media wiki configs if there is a way to define paths for CSS/Image/... content. That way those small, often requested files, will go through bleeding fast nginx.
We could implement that on-top of the caching items you mention in your Todo list. Actual squid-cache will not do so much for us since its on a single server. I think you can strike that.... caching and possible seperation of static content will give enough boost I suspect.

[valis]

Caching should work wonders for users not logged in (not sure how to set it up so that edits don't cause confusion, ie, seeing the edits on return to main page view). I didn't realize it before but it's entirely disk-bound (no database calls).

[at0m]

Woh, this one managed to escape from my horizon...

It hurt me to see there's nil edits so far, so... a bump for this super initiative!

[Ben Walker]

It hurt me to see there's nil edits so far

Not exactly nil edits. I had a bit of a spree when the site first became available, but then realised that I was the only one playing so gave up. If others care to join in, I will get back to it.

http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Modular_Synthesizer
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Minimax
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Blackbox
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/DXD
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Zarg_Music
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Solaris
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Ambient
http://www.scopedia.net/index.php/Quantum_Wave

Ben

[at0m]

Oh, these didn't link from/through the main page so I missed them.. I'll be adding to the wiki the next hours! =]

[valis]

I saw your post in IRC at0m (and replied there) but I should add here: I need to move the wiki to something that is less disk bound as it seems that speeding up the wiki for anyone who intends to stay permanently logged in can't be done via caching, and so you'll find 5-20 second waits on page views when logged in. The way around this is to tune the server heavily for mediawiki but when I did this it degraded the performance of almost all my clients, who are mostly SQL based (LAMP stack).

So...I will be moving things to a database driven wiki when I can. Until then it's a great idea to link anything you put up here, as we can still use the current installation as a 'working draft' and just port pages over once I get something better finalized. I have 2-3 different packages installed & tested on Virtualbox/rhel/Centos 5.2 here locally (my host is rhel based) and just need to do some testing on the server itself to finalize my decision. OR if anyone has any suggestions about a good database driven wiki app feel free to speak up and I can certainly test any others I didn't already try.

Apologies for taking so long to get off the ground, I didn't realize that mediawiki had grown into something that wasn't going to play well on an existing server (or take so much time to tune.) It is entirely possible that I've overlooked some tuning things for mediawiki as well, but I did spend several days in a row trying to get performance up with little change to the way it's running until I alter things that degrade performance for my paying customers...

[at0m]

Hey Valis, are you still reconsidering the wiki software? Is mediawiki putting any noticeable strain your server/hd or are you just looking for something more responsive?

What do others think? Is the site too slow? Editing/saving takes a while IMO, but that's nothing I can't live with...

Ben, what's taking so long?

[Ben Walker]

Ben, what's taking so long?

I'm back ! Anyone else joining in?
We need a better Wiki logo as well, but that's not my department!

[valis]

Sadly that's my department too! I apologize for my lack of speed here, but it's good that you're patient enough to deal with those editing times at0m. A quick secret...my wife is 5 months along with an upcoming child so have been busy with the 'responsible' side of my life. But I do have this on my to-do list!

[Ben Walker]

Sadly that's my department too! I apologize for my lack of speed here, but it's good that you're patient enough to deal with those editing times at0m. A quick secret...my wife is 5 months along with an upcoming child so have been busy with the 'responsible' side of my life. But I do have this on my to-do list!

No need to apologise - we're grateful to you for getting the thing going in the first place. We've got two months until mini modular number 3 arrives here, so I know all about the responsible side.

[at0m]

Sadly that's my department too!

If you'd take that up, but hey, it's an open wiki

A quick secret...my wife is 5 months along with an upcoming child...

Congratulations, Valis! A whole new world is opening up eh!
Was thinking to myself last week: daym, what's taking him so long Seriously!

[valis]

Sadly that's my department too!

If you'd take that up, but hey, it's an open wiki

Haha that's true! I was just remembering a promise made before, but if someone else puts something in place that's indeed true to the intent of the site.

A quick secret...my wife is 5 months along with an upcoming child...

Congratulations, Valis! A whole new world is opening up eh!
Was thinking to myself last week: daym, what's taking him so long Seriously!

Sadly this isn't the only pastime of mine where people are sitting there going "Valiiiiiiiiiiiis..........." But I did catch up on a few promises made to others last week so all hope isn't lost. Also noticing a bigger correlation with the winter sun cycles here the last few years than I had in the past, and that should soon change for the better as well (though it's still cold today.) I can still keep longer hours than many but I notice a correlation in my sleep cycles & the seasons more & more these days (affects my strength as well for the moderate exercising I do and so on.) Not that it's any excuse but it might do to consider my outlay of energies to others with the responsibilities coming my way...

One of the main things that's taken precedence for me is focusing on music so I have more than Flexor/Bowen & a few simple local clients to go off of in building a new clientelle (or getting a job etc) to prepare for the little one. Not because I think that I'll suddenly get some magical label throwing money my way for anything I do, but much of my income over the last 2 decades has come via people I've met doing music and I have more hope for that than peddling my mad skills in churning out diet websites (or whatever.)

[valis]

Knock Knock...I'm baaack!

Kidding... but I did find this:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension ... ntegration

It's a second potential point of failure but I already host at least 3 other phpbb forums which will all be phpbb3 shortly. Perhaps a 4th one used for user auth to offload the hit from hitting the disk or cache for access/permissions on each page view when logged into mediawiki. I prefer to browse logged in so I can edit as I read...this has been my main complaint with mediawiki so far, and it would simplify the user management for scopedia as well as I'm already fluent in phpbb (and give us a better backend discussion specific for the wiki moderation/administration etc.)

Thoughts?

[w_ellis]

Is it worth considering a hosted solution like http://www.wikia.com/Wikia to save bother on this? It would be great for this resource to be up and running.

[valis]

Well there's nothing stopping people from replicating work elsewhere, and really with a wiki all the data should be portable anyway. But bump this topic and remind me and maybe things will get done

A basic phpbb3 install is much faster than upgrading an existing forum (something I need to finish for mister bowen as well.) That, installing the proper plugin and modifying the wiki config shouldn't take more than an hour or so to get working and might just make the wiki usable when you're logged in (by pushing the auth checks onto mysql instead of disk access...) Just remind me if I forget please, I have a busy week with work and a few creative projects that I've already committed to.

[zangsta]

sorry..page hijacked by porn-peddlers !