Categories
General Technical

Scheduled server maintenance on August 4th

Hello users.
ShoutWiki will be going offline on August 4th (UTC) for scheduled maintenance.

Why are we doing this?

You may have noticed that ShoutWiki has been fairly slow recently. This is an issue affecting all users and is rather annoying. The maintenance is expected to get the site running significantly faster meaning less loading time and more editing time.

Edit by Lewis Cawte:

In more technical detail, for those who are wondering – our server host will be replacing our HTTPd which renders PHP files and makes them readable to the client (your web browser) thus giving you the output that you read, the ability to edit and so on. We are doing this because as of recent, it has been causing us a lot of problems and has been crashing rather frequently – which caused you to see pages such as “Could not find server at http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page”. This does change will not affect data, as all wiki edits and contents are stored in a MySQL database which is a completely different piece of software.

How long are we offline for?

We will be offline for 24 hours at the maximum. The maintenance might be finished before the 24 hours is over, which will mean ShoutWiki will be up sooner than then. If the maintenance is not complete within 24 hours, it will be stopped and ShoutWiki will be brought back online.

To clear things up, this is not a repeat of our previous downtimes. This downtime is planned, unlike previous downtimes, and is expected to improve ShoutWiki, rather than damage ShoutWiki.

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Thank you,
Solar Dragon – ShoutWiki Customer Support

Categories
General Technical

Easier programmatical access to ShoutWiki wikis’ meta-data

Have you ever wondered just how many wikis ShoutWiki hosts? I bet you have, and so have we at the staff team at times. Finding that out has been easy, thanks to the {{NUMBEROFWIKIS}} magic word. But what if you have wanted to know how many of those wikis are French, for example? Or how many were created between March and April 2010?

In the past, finding out such info has been tedious and it has required the user to spend countless hours browsing ShoutWiki Hub, our main site, which contains description pages about all public (and school) wikis that we host.

Today brings a change to that with the introduction of the ShoutWiki API extension, which adds a new API module that allows fetching all kinds of information about our wikis. To find out which of our wikis are written in the French language (language code fr), query the action=listwikis module with swlang=fr parameter, like this:

http://www.shoutwiki.com/w/api.php?action=listwikis&swlang=fr

Language isn’t the only information the API module exposes; other info, such as the founder-supplied description, the wiki’s sitename ($wgSitename), creation timestamp and a lot more are available! Take a look at the help documentation that accessing api.php without any parameters produces.

We do, however, ask you to read the MediaWiki.org page about API etiquette before querying the API; basically, be considerate and don’t try to take the site down and you’ll be fine.

Please let us know your thoughts on this new API interface in the comments section!

On behalf of the ShoutWiki staff,

Jack Phoenix
Head of the Customer Support Team