Toolserver Journal » General

River becomes the first paid toolserver admin

daniel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:23:29 +0000

The Toolserver now has a paid admin: Wikimedia Deutschland contracted River Tarnell to look after the Toolserver, starting February 1. As you probably know, River has been an integral part of the Toolserver team from the very beginning, and has done a great job as a volunteer. However, when doing system administration in your spare time, the more annoying jobs tend to be left – which may lead to unpleasantness or even downtime every now and then. A fixed number of hours dedicated to the toolserver and a protocol for emergency situations will now help us to get the Toolserver’s availability to at least 99%.

Contracting a payed admin should also benefit the other Toolserver administrators, as they can now rely on River to look after the every day operations and to coordinate further administration work. Volunteer work will of course remain an essential component in the operation of the Toolserver, as is the case with all Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Deutschland wants to thank everyone who works on the toolserver, all admins and users, for their great contributions. We look forward to a future of even greater success of the Tooserver project!

Wherein the Toolserver journal is reborn in a much less annoying fashion

river — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:47:39 +0000

So, for a while we used Apache Roller for the journal. Roller was something I’d used before (as a user, not an admin), and it could be integrated into our web SSO system, so it seemed like a good fit. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well. Roller is rather clunky to use, and has a few small bugs (mostly related to SSO) that made it somewhat unpleasant to use. Today, it decided not to allow a new user to log in, and wouldn’t provide any sort of useful error message besides Java stack traces. So, I decided it was time for a change.

The Toolserver journal is now running on WordPress. WordPress is much nicer to use, looks nicer for users, and has a large community of users. It was also very easy to set up, and allowed us to import the old posts from Roller. The only downside is the lack of an up-to-date LDAP integration plugin. However, I don’t think that should be too hard to write…

PS: In case Planet gets confused by the change and re-displays all our old posts–sorry!

Welcome to the toolserver blog

Thu, 29 May 2008 20:47:06 +0000

Welcome to the new Toolserver blog. As well as improving our Web 2.0 compliance, the Toolserver blog will contains fascinating posts about Toolserver internals, that don’t make it onto the mailing list.