Some time ago I created MediaWiki Widget for TypePad Connect:
http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/TypePad_Connect

While editing a wiki page and going to different versions of it, I noticed that Comments widget has a well known issue – it has no idea which comments should be displayed on the page if page has different URLs (ad campaign tracking codes will probably be a main commercial issue, but also editing interfaces in MediaWiki and other CMS softwares and so on) – you can see example of what I’m talking about on these two pages:

• http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/TypePad_Connect
• http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/w/index.php?title=TypePad_Connect

which represent the same content page with different URL.

Other frameworks like JS-Kit, for example, solve this problem by allowing to pass URL or ID of the page to the widget, but I just had an idea about new approach to this issue.

The thing is that Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft just announced a new tag in order to fight SEO spam (and I already installed MW extension from Wikia):

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/TypePad_Connect"/>

The idea is very simple – they just need to know all the pages that legitimately think that they are copies of page X so their smart algorithm that fights page duplication spam will have more clues.

But the side effect is that tools like TypePad Connect or JS-Kit can automatically, on the fly identify the pages they should serve content for. All you need to do is to write a simple jQuery code like this (my first line of jQuery) :

var canonical = $('html:first > head:first > link[rel=canonical]').attr('href');

I think all of us will benefit if widgetized tool providers like TypePad will push for this as solution to the page identity problems.

I hope this will be included into a list of high priority issues and TypePad Connect will get improved first (I actually enjoyed creating widget for it – it was much-much easier then with other vendors).

I’ve done some integration of OpenID selector into MediaWiki OpenID extension and some fixing/improvements of the latter.

You can see changes on TPr, MWW and SharingButtons.

Next week will take a look into checking it back in. Still need to figure out if I can check in BSD code (selector) into MW tree or need to write something similar (I’m even thinking about creating something like SharingButtons, but for OpenID providers) and release with GPL.

Did some maintenance on my projects – added OpenID support to wikis:

• http://www.sharingbuttons.org/Special:OpenIDLogin
• http://www.techpresentations.org/Special:OpenIDLogin
• http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Special:OpenIDLogin

Also working on embedding OpenID selector – check Sharing Buttons OpenID login page (still needs some work, but quite promising).

Also changed all wikis and blogs to use memcached instead of APC for cache storage – it seems to be much more efficient.

While walking to work early today I came up with the name for my blog – “Binary Orders of Magnitude”. I think it’s a good name for personal blog and sounds very big and global as all blog names should sound as all of us live to accomplish something big. Plus it has some geekish humor to it ;)

Hope you enjoy it – let me know what you think.

I’m giving a talk about Web Performance at NY Web Standards Meetup on March 19^th.

I’ll talk about the performance of Web applications and sites in general, why it matters and what can be done to improve it. Presentation covers both front and back-end performance, with emphasis on the front-end and it will be useful for everyone from designers to system administrators.

General understanding of web development is required, but a wide range of performance tuning techniques, available to every skill level, will be covered.

I’ll be happy to see you there, but you need to RSVP – only 10 seats left already, so you better hurry.

Finally, I spent some time researching Google Gadgets implementation
and implemented it successfully as MediaWiki widget: http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Google_Gadget

Previously I had some issues with it as there was no control over the
values in the URLs without escaping them, but Gadget wizard didn’t
really allow to easily copy unescaped values for the URL. To avoid
this problem, I added new feature to the Widgets extension to support
validation of parameters without escaping them so to use Google Gadgets widget, you’ll have to upgrade your installation to version 0.8.3: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Widgets#Download_instructions

This dramatically expands the amount of widgets/gadgets you can install on your wiki – previously there were only Widgetbox widgets getting which required much more hassle and relied on the user account to be created on Widgetbox site which in my view reduced adoption.

So go to Google Gadgets catalog and grab what you like: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open
;)

As always, help is available at http://groups.google.com/group/mediawiki-widgets or just post your comments here.

I’m trying to summarize my knowledge about the URLs and research all possible aspects of URL planning and design to write up something useful for others to use.

If you have any links to good articles, presentations, research papers or something, please send them my way (post as comments here, or twitt them at me @sergeyche or send them to @sergeychernyshev at identi.ca or email me at sergey . chernyshev at gmail).

Will really appreciate your help!