Talk: Mikk/Archive01

Moving content from stuff like Template:Delete

In reference to moving the contents of Template:Delete to Template:Delete/Content and having the former call the latter — brilliant idea, I must say. Good call. Schmidt 07:31, 25 May 2006 (EDT)

I like the fact that you "play-test" the changes you make. I use exclusively Mozilla Firefox (when at home), and on occasion MSIE, but never Opera or any others. Schmidt 13:46, 30 May 2006 (EDT)

Pfft. And I was berating myself for not doing it enough ;) --Mikk 13:50, 30 May 2006 (EDT)

Changes to Template:Alliance Icon Small

You made changes to Template:Alliance Icon Small which seem to cause problems when the icon is in a list. Check out  [Ghost Dye] and look in the Source section. The icon is moved down to the next row. I'm assuming it has something to do with Category:WoW utility templates addition. Could you look into this? - ClydeJr 15:36, 30 May 2006 (EDT)

Bah, I knew something was going to leap up and bite me in the arse with this job. Ok, I fixed it. Joy, now I have to go back over all the rest of the templates I've fiddled with. --Mikk 15:43, 30 May 2006 (EDT)

Category talk:Templates that should have been local

Category:Templates that should have been local has some templates listed that I feel do not belong there. See and respond in Category talk:Templates that should have been local, since that's the more logical place to respond. Also, perhaps rewording the category page's text may be in order. Schmidt 17:18, 30 May 2006 (EDT)

Help Team

Hey wanna join the help team? You posted on the village pump that you might be interested in working with the help section and Fandyllic appointed me leader for now since I was the only active person interested in the help team. Thought you might want to join up too.--Ralthor 08:36, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

Aeuhm, not really. That'd assume some sort of long-term committment on my part that I'm not really willing to make. My stack of pushed work looks something like this:

• Play WoW (almost one month ago since I did this now)
  • Write a nice mod for my guild (75% done)
    • Create a mod development framework for offline development (got annoyed by lack of debugging capabilities in-game)
      • Decide to write a WoWWiki page for it
        • Decide to contribute some of my accumulated knowledge to the API pages while I'm here
          • Get annoyed with not finding information
            • After lots of digging, start tweaking central pages and structures in WoWWiki so others don't have to suffer the same fate

Now, this means tweaking help pages when I get annoyed at something, or, heck, helping you whenever you request it, but, in the long run, I'd really just like to get back to item 1 sometime soon :-)

--Mikk 14:24, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

Widget API, and other things

I've already sort of responded to this on my talk page, so you can head over there too, but the widget API page is actually script-generated based on source files I maintain. For all the wonderment that is the wiki, it's just not got the kind of templating and content assembly functionality to allow us to manage it as a wiki-based template, so instead I keep a summary document of my own (updated from the wiki when i'm doing an update), that feeds into the document generation process. The workflow is something like this:

1. Scan the wow environment for frame types and method definitions
2. Analyze the scanned information and create a class hierarchy
3. Compare my previously uploaded widget API with the current one and propagate changes from the wiki into my reference source
4. Cross reference class hierarchy with reference documentation source to create pages
5. Upload pages to wiki

Now, to date there's only been one page, though my suggested summary pages will break that trend, though uploading them sanely is a pain - but that's nothing some time and some perl can't handle. The real challenge is making sure I notice user changes, I periodically scan the api pages for changes so I'm at least dimly aware of how much change there is. I'm tempted to put a note on all of the summary pages that they are machine generated and as such updates will be deleted unless they're also made on the main API.

As for some of the confusion on my relocation of frame methods, look at Widget API New for the reasons behind it, 1.11 changes significant things.

-- Flickering 14:31, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

Ahhh, that explains things. Thanks, now I know :-) --Mikk 14:51, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

Re: not having to scan each and every subpage for added info... I'd say "heck yeah, do it". --Mikk 14:52, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

Now, let's talk about the main API page, this is another monster. I tried to get it under control like the widget API, but the level of effort outstripped my available time by an order of magnitude so I've backed off it a little. You have touched upon some of the things I've experimented with or thought about, so I figured I'd throw in my 2 cents here.

First, I dont really mind removing those functions documented in the 5.0 lua documentation, as long as wow doesn't make them behave differently, however someone will likely just add them back, so I'm not sure it's much of a win. Those compatibility functions which are holdovers older LUA versions, however, are likely worth including there just to eliminate a bunch of hunting around (especially now that compat.lua isn't included in the standard UI extract).

I'm a strong believer in sane categorization of the API functions, as long as it doesn't hey out of hand, 2 categories makes sense if one is 'functional' in terms of what the function does, and and one is 'posessive' in terms of what it acts upon. I would think 3 categories rare, and four or more excessive and confusing. My feeling is that effort should be made to get the category links right on the API documentation pages themselves, and creative scripting and a bit of time can make the master API index automatically generate itself from that information. I actually got 75% of this working and used it for the last major overhaul of the API page I did (some time ago), and I've been trying to set up mechanisms to allow myself to efficiently do the rest.

As for a namespace, I think if someone with appropriate administrative rights can do the original grunt work of relocating all of the pages, then maintaining things afterwards will be fine. I will say I dont really like Dev as the namespace, but I can't come up with a much better suggestion than API, which I actually dont mind, even though it makes the renaming and unification a more complex undertaking.

Anyway, i'll shut up now.

-- Flickering 14:41, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

I considered "API:" as a namespace name, but it doesn't really make sense to me. I'd like to group all the development resources under a logical umbrella, because there's so much that most people are missing out on - check out Category:Interface customization. There's much more there than Joe User realizes, I think. I was thinking that grouping things up under a nice techy base name would make people less leery to go look at "that other stuff that seems newb" or whatever is happening. Then again, it looks like this just isn't happening - Schmidt talked it over with Rustak, who doesn't seem to want to add new namespaces.

I see the namespace issue and the categorization issue as solving slightly different problems. I dont think a new namespace is needed for most of the development resources because their names are going to be mostly distinct from the other types of pages and there aren't THAT many of them, things like FAQ's and HOWTO's notwithstanding, whereas a namespace is handy for something like the API/Object/Event data because there's a whole lot of content that's of a specific flavor (technical specification documentation) that's sort of off to the side from the more literate content. We're essentially simulating naespaces with our fixed prefix approach anyway. Flickering 15:59, 4 June 2006 (EDT)

On categories though... what do you think about (the general idea of) the categories I did suggest in the API talk page? I'm not sure if your "max 2" comment applies to categorizing API functions or categorizing development related pages in general. --Mikk 14:51, 2 June 2006 (EDT)

The max 2 comment applies to API function documentation, I haven't though through the categorization of other documents to that level of detail, although there are some dangers to getting carried away with cross categorization there. As for your suggestions, a category for object types, one for data types, one for API calls (though I see this one as a category containing the subcategories that reflect the structure of the API page) make sense. And of course a strict prohibitiion for a page to ever appear in 2 categories if one of those categories is a parent of the other. Flickering 15:59, 4 June 2006 (EDT)

Thanks

This is just a thanks for all the work you're doing ... I know many people who will certainly appreciate the Interface section stuff you're doing (ever visited the wowi IRC channel?). And, of course, I appreciate the sexifying of the wiki ;) -- Kirkburn 18:15, 12 June 2006 (EDT)

Hey, no problem. Half the job is teaching myself where the heck everything is so it's hardly a waste :-)

And... wowwiki IRC channel? o.O --Mikk 18:18, 12 June 2006 (EDT)

Nah, the wowinterface IRC channel, where all the cool devs hang out :D -- Kirkburn 18:33, 12 June 2006 (EDT)

*sob* I'm uncool :-(     ... ;-)   --Mikk 18:35, 12 June 2006 (EDT)

So fast! What are you, stalking me? I'm intrigued to know what you're interface stuff you're involved in? I'm not exactly Mr. Coder myself, but I do enjoy hearing people talk gobbledeegook, er, I mean Lua. -- Kirkburn 18:37, 12 June 2006 (EDT)

Well, I started making a DKP/loot mod for my guild. Then one wednesday morning I got annoyed that I couldn't code because the servers were down. So I downloaded a standalone Lua package just so I could at least test if stuff parsed. Then I got the crazy idea "Hey! How much work would it really be to fake the APIs needed so I can actually test stuff offline? And it'd give me much better debugging capabilities!" So I wrote an offline WoW API emulator + XML parser in Lua, which can load addons and let them play around in that sandbox.

Of course, emulating all the APIs is FAR from done. I'm expanding as I see needs develop. But currently it can at least load the Ace library, CTRA, a bunch of other mods I use normally, and they survive the initial startup messages.

Anyway, this is what I came here to WoWWiki to do, originally: post pages describing this monstrosity and invite some community effort. I figure it could be both appreciated and useful. --Mikk 18:44, 12 June 2006 (EDT) → back to tweaking Interface Customization again.

Hey thanks for adding the player tag to my page (Peegee) :D Piepants 18:15, 13 June 2006 (EDT)Piepants

Tip of the day colour

Seriously, it looked that bad on your screen? It looked fine on mine :/ Your colour choice is better, though. I was trying to keep it in the same colour area as before :P -- Kirkburn 17:08, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

It quite literally looked like poop + arterial blood. It was not very inviting :-)

Gawd, one of our monitors must be broken then ;) -- Kirkburn 17:38, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

WoWBench

Would love to help out with WoWBench development. I've been dying to get something like this working, so I can remotely develop on my machine via SSH. My contact info is on my User Page. Thanks for getting something like this started. --Tarog 21:18, 15 June 2006 (EDT)

Main Page Dev 3

I'm done for now - it's your turn :) The links needs sorting methinks -- Kirkburn 09:50, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

→ @irc --Mikk 09:56, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

__NOSECTIONEDIT__

What's the deal with this nosectionedit kick? It's a nuisance when I want to edit only a section, and I'm used to just right-clicking the section title. Beyond that, if you allow section editing, the summary (as you well know, I assume) is populated with the particular section. That way people can know where you made the edit without looking at what the edit consisted of. Is there a good reason you use it? It shouldn't be just for cosmetics, I think. Schmidt 01:52, 18 June 2006 (EDT)

Is there a template in particular you're thinking about? I don't think I've ever added it myself; I'm more or less of the same view. I've just let it live on where it's already existed, I think. --Mikk 05:29, 18 June 2006 (EDT)

The only places I think it deserves to exist is on protected pages and pages where it would mess up the formatting. Rumored Races is a good example of the latter. Weirdly, though, the Main Page doesn't have it (although, heh, WoWWiki:Main Page Dev 3 does). -- Kirkburn 06:39, 18 June 2006 (EDT)

On Template talk:Infoline, [1]. In this span of time, only you edited the page, and somehow this code popped up. I basically agree with Kirkburn here. And this code should never appear in a template, IMO. Schmidt 23:06, 18 June 2006 (EDT)

Ehrmmmm, dude, I have no idea whatsoever why I put that one in there. Brainfart? Or maybe it was doing butt-ugly things to earlier versions of the bands? I have a hazy recollection about a page at some point where I got like four or five [Edit] boxes on a long string on the same line. Maybe it was that one. *shrug* There's certainly no point to having it now.

And yeah agree about templates. I will now consider myself to have The Blessing of the Powers That Be to yank it whenever I find it in a template :-)   --Mikk 05:45, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Yep, I guess so. Schmidt 09:23, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Template:wowapi fixed width

→ template talk:apinav --Mikk 09:15, 18 June 2006 (EDT)