User talk:Metraxis

If you ever make it back here, apologies for erasing most if not all of your work.

I hope you like what I've done with the place! --StDoodle (#1059825) 18:07, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

To expand a little:

All of the function pages have been moved; they no longer have () at the end. I've had fewyn install a special mediawiki extension with the sole purpose of being able to tack () back onto the end of the function names as they are displayed on each page, as I understand the desire to be consistent with programming conventions. However, having them in the page name itself severely breaks the search functionality of the wiki (wikis are designed around the idea that stuff at the end in parentheses is for disambiguation pages, and if that's the only way an article exists, you'll never find it without including the parentheses). Technically, the originals were deleted, as I didn't have the admin power to move pages without leaving the originals as redirects until recently. But what actually happened was that I moved each page, the wiki changed the original to be a redirect to the new location, and the moved (original) info was my starting point for entering information.

The primitive and enumerated templates are gone because I'm now trying to list all of that info on the Datatype Constants page (a lot of general info doesn't need repeating for each, and so they're all in one place; though each has its own redirect-only page pointing to its appropriate section).

Finally, Linux was moved to Linux Installation (as there may be a more general page for other issues specific to each OS in the future).

So it's not so much that I completely erased your work, in a sense. A lot has been expanded and rewritten, to be sure, but such is the purpose of a wiki; get up info as you can, clarify and expand as you go.

I think if you play around a while you'll appreciate the changes. Function pages have a consistent look & layout, such that once you're used to them each new function page presents information in a familiar way. They're standardized such that it's fairly easy to set one up, and all of the datatype references (with the exception of "any" as used in a few conversion functions) now link to their section on Datatype Constants. (Even aggregates are recognized as such and point to that section.)

Meanwhile, the pseudo-category pages (actual category pages use a poor-for-programming-syntax display of page names, as you're likely aware) have easy-to-create, consistent-looking links to each function page. (Which are also capable of supporting aggregates and optional parameters; though I felt it best to list each possible function call separately on the actual function pages.)

There's even an extension to the wiki allowing for syntax highlighting in code blocks, now. The biggest downside is that some of the templates themselves are a bit complicated. As such, I do have concerns about what will happen if I ever lose interest in the project, without someone else who understands templates coming forward to fill in. But, on the whole, I think the wiki is now much easier to navigate for someone who isn't really familiar with ASH to begin with, and at least as easy-to-use as it was before for those who are.

Please poke around and let me know what you think!

--StDoodle (#1059825) 15:39, 15 March 2010 (UTC)