Disqus - Latest Comments for robvdl

Re: Gallery update

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 18:45:08 -0000

I have considered making the forums readonly for archival purposes. Having Discord means the forums are totally redundant and remain unused for years. But there is some history in there, so perhaps making them readonly is a good thing to look at for the future.

Re: How to Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 24.04 (Full Guide)

Rob van der Linde — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 19:22:37 -0000

You don't need inkscape on a server. Why does the guide recommend installing inkscape, that is a GUI program. You need imagemagick but not inkscape, that doesn't make sense.

Re: Moving the forums to Markdown and Emojis 🥳

Rob van der Linde — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 17:20:28 -0000

I've fixed the issue with the hyperlinks, that was something small.

I've also created a script to convert all the smileys in the forum to Emoji's, but I still have to do the same thing for all blog posts and pages.

I don't think many pages had the classic smileys we used from ynui.co.nz so much, but blog posts definitly did.

Re: Moving the forums to Markdown and Emojis 🥳

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 20:22:10 -0000

There's a small bug I did discover that if a Markdown post, comment or profile signature contains JUST a link and nothing else, it won't autolink it properly (turn it into a hyperlink).

That bug will lie in the Markdown library, but I can probably code around it in the next release so stay tuned.

Re: First Wainuiomata.com project on Github

Rob van der Linde — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:55:42 -0000

This is not the first Open Source code we have released, we have released stuff years ago but since moving to Wagtail that isn't really relevant anymore.

This is our first code under github.com/wainuiomata however.

Re: Reversing temporary fix for old theme

Rob van der Linde — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:00:12 -0000

The default zoom level change has been reversed now. Gallery works as expected again, but unfortunately a magnifying glass might be needed on mobile until the new theme. Kidding, pinch and zoom still works off course.

On that note, I am back at work again, so my available time on the site had reduced, but I am still doing regular updates and making progress on the new theme.

Re: Early articles on wainuiomata.com development

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:51:12 -0000

The early designs are also a real throwback. And even the current design is now well indexed in the Internet Archive for years already, and will eventually get replaced.

So it's really cool to have the Internet Archive. Some of the articles on this site are so old, we discuss Wikipedia coming out, and Google Earth when it just came out and was still a desktop app. That is how long ago.

Re: Tweaking the Content Security Policy of the site

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:25:15 -0000

I have found that adblockers like ublock origin are only triggered by Disqus if you click into an article.

If you just look at the blog index page it doesn't load that stuff thankfully.

Re: Turning off Google Analytics

Rob van der Linde — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:34:43 -0000

There is one account I kept, was a legitimate one. Shows we really need to turn on registrations again, people do want to still create accounts. Even though the forums are pretty dead today.

Re: Turning off Google Analytics

Rob van der Linde — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 14:31:54 -0000

Custom fonts are also loading from our domain now, no longer from Google. We're trying to load as much as possible from our own domain.

Re: Frontend rebuild progress update

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 13:48:29 -0000

I made a fun little optimisation "in the mean time" while waiting for the new theme.

The old theme is now run through the frontend postcss built pipeline. This means:

* We get linting on the CSS file according to our stylint rules
* Small images are automatically inlined in the CSS files to reduce the number of requests
* CSS files for third party libraries can be merged into the primary CSS file to reduce the number of requests even more
* Final CSS file is minimised to reduce the file size even further

Re: Frontend rebuild progress update

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:06:51 -0000

The backend:flake8 job also has some flake8 plugins, flake8-black and flake8-isort.

For the frontend pipelines we tend to use separate pipelines for eslint, prettier, styleint etc. For the backend pipelines we have just combined it into a single pipeline.

Re: Frontend rebuild progress update

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 14:55:29 -0000

We also maintain other sites, so sometimes some backporting is involved. This is to ensure the sites remain relatively consistent and makes it easier to maintain if things are more or less setup the same.

Re: Starting frontend rebuild

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:32:40 -0000

I want to actually get rid of the links section but I don't want to lose all the Wainuiomata links in it, so I'll somehow fit it in with the redesign problably.

A page page with a list of links is very 2000, it makes the site look old, that and guestbooks or contact forms :)

Re: Starting frontend rebuild

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:10:46 -0000

Forgot to even mention what site, wainuiomata.net, I think I might have seen this before years ago, but I'm not sure.

What is interesting is this site appears to be doing locations as well just like us, around the same time we started adding lots of locations like Pukeatua Bridge. But the history that is unique, we don't do a lot of that.

The location stuff is not exactly a new idea anyway, and we did have a business directory way back in 2005 but we never had locations until recently.

We didn't share notes, at least I hadn't seen the site until yesterday. We also have a very custom codebase, it's Wagtail, but very much custom. That gives us a lot of flexibility, but also might take a little longer to develop things at times, but that is OK.

Re: Ten brown kiwi birds will be released in Rimutaka Forest Park

Rob van der Linde — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:18:00 -0000

Now called Remutaka forest park as it's using the official Maori name again. But editing an article from 2006 to "fix it up" is wrong so I'll just leave a comment here instead. It was still called Rimutaka in 2006 I think. Not entirely sure when they renamed it back to the Maori name.

Re: 20 years of Wainuiomata.com

Rob van der Linde — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:03:49 -0000

There are old copies of the site in the Internet Archive dating back to 2005, we were then "Ynui Technology" rather than wainuiomata.com, that came later. I'm sure the idea started as early as 2003 though when we started building the server with Redhat Linux at the time. This was so long ago, it was before Fedora Core even came out.

The awesome thing about this is it seems to have some sort of changelog of all the features I was adding in each release. This would probably be a long lost changelog without the Internet Archive as this is so old I don't think we were even using git yet, maybe Subversion.

https://web.archive.org/web...

Re: Directory ... continued

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 14:42:18 -0000

One thing the search doesn't handle yet is partial words, which I'm aware about. It has to do with the choice of full text engine used.

For example search for "Django" to find posts about "GeoDjango" and it won't get any results, but search for "GeoDjango" and it will.

It only indexes "whole words", perhaps one day we'll setup a heavier full text search backend that can also handle partial words.

Re: Business and clubs directory

Rob van der Linde — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 14:10:37 -0000

Also there is more than just businesses and clubs, there are also schools and public places like the library. So I'll most definitely build special page types for those too.

Re: Business and clubs directory

Rob van der Linde — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 13:57:20 -0000

If anyone has any additional ideas just let us know. The one thing I don't want to turn this into is an advertising mess. I'm hoping businesses keep their business page useful rather than turn it into a place to throw ads up, because we've always been free of that and for the last 20 years our site has been very clean and ad-free and we would like it to stay that way.

Re: Website registrations

Rob van der Linde — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 14:48:21 -0000

I think social auth in the way forward in 2023. I mean logging in with your Facebook account or Gmail but also still supporting classic login.

No the website absolutely does NOT run on Wordpress, despite the constant attempts at Wordpress scans and attacks. The site is a custom solution built on top of a well known Python CMS framework.

We used to have our own commenting system, but quite some time ago moved it to Disqus. I always planned to move the comments back one day, but fighting that level of SPAM is not easy and it's not priority (compared to say a redesign for mobile).

Re: 20 years of Wainuiomata.com

Rob van der Linde — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:41:17 -0000

At the time of writing we seem to be the ONLY Wainuiomata site around again. Love wainuiomata has been down for a week at least and the .co.nz has been down for ages like well over a year.

Re: Wainuiomata.social - Mastodon instance

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 17:21:33 -0000

The instance was running for about 6 months as a trial, but I decided it was a bit too much to handle and I ended up shutting it down, see https://wainuiomata.com/blo...

Re: 20 years of Wainuiomata.com

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 17:16:44 -0000

One thing we also did at some point to combat spam on the blog is move the comments to Disqus. Running our own spam filter algorithm successfully was a little beyond our ability at the time, so we moved the comments over to Disqus to handle the spam. I really wish to one day bring it all back in though.

On the other hand, the forums require a login and spammer can be stopped a little more easier than a blog with a totally public commenting system.

Re: 20 years of Wainuiomata.com

Rob van der Linde — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 17:12:45 -0000

Actually thinking about it now, yes the forums did exist in the PHP version of the site already. I remember it quite vividly now.