I recently published version 0.8 of Wikked, my plain-text-files/SCM-backed
wiki engine, followed immediately by a quick little patch release. Grab it as
usual with a pip install wikked -U!

Although there are a few interesting new things in this release, the more
important announcement here is the launch of the official website
running itself on Wikked! Head over there now and tell me if anything
looks broken!

Keep reading if you want more information about all this.

New and Improved

There is now a simple way to upload files to your wiki – both as global files
(uploaded to the _files directory) or as page-local files (uploaded next to
the current page’s file). It looks like this and yes there is room for
improvement 🙂

The permission system has been re-written to use a more standard ACL-type model. You can check out the help section on permissions for more information…

…which leads me to the new help pages. You can see them on the official
website, but they come bundled with any Wikked wiki, since they’re part
of the source code. As such, they’re read-only (although you can edit them and
submit a pull request if you spot a mistake!). You can access them from the
“Help” link at the bottom of any wiki page.

Another thing you might have noticed with that link to the help section on
permissions is that Wikked now generates links for each heading on a page.

Last but not least, I re-did the UX of the navigation menu so that it finally
works correctly on both desktop and mobile browsers.

The Official Wiki

The other big new thing is the official Wikked wiki, which runs on
Wikked (unlike the previous official project page which was just a static page
generated with my other big web project, PieCrust).

Right now it looks a bit like this:

There’s not much to say about this besides “it’s about time”. There’s not even
much on that wiki yet – most of the content comes from the aforementioned new
help pages.

I wonder how long it will take until somebody finds a security hole in Wikked
and adds a dick pic to the home page. Oh well, I’ll worry about that if Wikked
actually gets popular… and even then, if you really want to post dick pics,
you can already do that on the Wikked sandbox wiki or, well, anywhere
on the internet, really.

And that’s it! If you haven’t checked out Wikked yet, give it a go:

1. pip install wikked
2. wk init mywiki
3. cd mywiki && wk runserver

Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, Greg Stafford passed away. He was best known as the founder of Chaosium (one of the greatest role-playing game publishers in history), co-designer of RuneQuest (one of the greatest role-playing games in history), and creator of Glorantha (one of the greatest fantasy universes in history).

Since then, there has been a lot of talk about his life and legacy, but I can mostly recommend Ken and Robin’s Special Podcast Episode, which has several anecdotes about Greg, and the Chaosium Forums’ Condolence Thread, which has quite a few nice pictures, stories, and words on the subject.

Now, the folks at Chaosium recently made a call to play a game in honour of Greg next weekend (November 10th). Although you can frankly play any game and be certain that Greg Stafford had at least some kind of indirect influence over its design and/or its author, it’s obviously even better if you play a game that is more directly linked to him. Sadly, our weekly Friday game night is on a hiatus from our Call of Cthulhu campaign – that would have been our best homage to Greg, short of playing RuneQuest or Pendragon. But what we’re doing is still not too bad, as we just started a 7th Sea one-shot adventure, and John Wick, the game’s author, recently posted a nicely worded blog post about how much influence Greg had on his career (which includes L5R in addition to 7th Sea).

So I guess we’ll be plundering ships and fighting sea monsters for the occasion.

Farewell, Mr. Stafford.

Last month marked IRC’s 30 year anniversary! Jarkko Oikarinen booted up the first IRC server some time in August 1988 at the University of Oulu in Finland.

The New Stack reminisced about the good ol’ days:

“It’s the kind of place that slaps you around a bit with a large trout.”

Developer Khaled Mardam-Bey enhanced his 1995 Windows IRC client mIRC
with a /slap command based on an old Monty Python skit. Typing /slap
and a user’s name would type out a sentence indicating that you were
slapping that user around with a large trout.

I used mIRC in the late 90s and early 2000s as a French student, and definitely remember this “feature” that I found funny but totally random. Of course, that’s because I didn’t know the Monty Python back then… I hadn’t given it any thought until recently!

This IRC anniversary is also a good opportunity to see how resilient open and decentralized communication protocols are – while proprietary platforms like ICQ or AOL IM came and went away, IRC just carried on. As Drew DeVault says, please stop using Slack.

Of course, IRC has its share of problems, but it’s sad how Slack is solving them not by improving IRC, but by building a different, proprietary solution. I guess this is what happens when the Internet stops being built by universities, governments, and communities, and is instead built by publicly traded companies and VC-backed start-ups… although you occasionally find a rare one that does the right thing.

Indeed, I had checked IRCCloud a while ago, but figured I wanted to keep “having fun”¹ managing my own ZNC bouncer with multi-client support and notifications. But now, I realize that they’re helping with the IRCv3 standard (like, say, implementing reply threads and avatars), so I started supporting them by using (and paying for) their service (which, incidentally, you can point to your private ZNC if you wish to). Their client is pretty good, too (both online or as a phone app). Basically that’s me voting with my wallet.

Long live IRC! Or Matrix. Or something.