While doing routine software upgrades on both MYSTcommunity and MYSTlore, I figured it was time to change the “branding” to be more similar. Previously, the skin had been an largely unchanged variant of MediaWiki’s “Monobook”. It’s still a derivative, but now far more reminiscent of the one Tay¹ made for MYSTcommunity. I hope you like the changes, because for simplicity’s sake, I’m no longer allowing you to pick a different skin.

Now I’m wondering what to do about the international versions. The English version, while low-traffic, has a steady stream of both readers and contributors, and has developed into the vast resource of information I had hoped it would become. The localized versions, however, are still far too unpopular. Unfortunately, MediaWiki requires a separate installation for each language², so the maintenance effort is absurdly high. If you enjoy the Dutch or German version of MYSTlore, or if you’d like to start off another language version (French, anyone?), please find more readers and contributors!

1. Who hasn’t blogged in almost a year! Tsk-tsk. ↩
2. Or at least it used to — perhaps they have fixed this? ↩

I’m still at a loss what exactly happened, but it must have been a combination of bad timing on the housing company’s part, negligence on mine, and incompetence on that of the bank.

In any case, a relatively simple, brief conversation on Thursday fixed it, or so I thought: the nice lady told me the server should be back up within fifteen minutes.

You may have noticed it wasn’t, but whatever the reason, it now is.

Must be jetlag.

Oh dear.

This is not at all a slam against Gorobay; I highly appreciate his contributions to MYSTlore.

It is instead me failing to comprehend how anyone could have thought that a software should treat “Guild of burial workers” and “Guild of Burial Workers” as distinct articles to begin with. Without a redirect set up (as Gorobay did), going to the non-existant one will simply lead you to a 404-esque page, with a search link, which will then redirect you to the correct page. Why have that interim step to begin with?

There are actually cases on MYSTlore where we take advantage of the case-sensitive nature of MediaWiki article titles. Off the top of my head, “MYST” and “RIVEN” come to mind: they point to the games, whereas “Myst” and “Riven” point to the Ages. This distinction makes sense insofar as spelling the two in all-uppercase is a marketing thing; they’re not acronyms, initialisms or anything, but instead names, so they should be capitalized as proper nouns. Therefore, when one writes them as all capitalized, they are more likely to refer to the product.

But that’s an extremely rare occasion, and still a very questionable one. Perhaps you meant the other one after all? Perhaps (quite likely) you don’t really think of them as distinct at all? And how are you supposed to know the aforementioned rationale for the redirect?

Chances are you can’t read this, but maybe you’re lucky. The host running this blog, MYSTcommunity, MYSTlore, the D’ni Linguistic Fellowship as well as various other sites is experiencing DNS issues; even though the sites are running, you won’t normally be able to reach them.

You can temporarily fix this by editing your hosts file. On a Unix-like system (including Linux, Mac OS X, etc.), this file resides in /etc/hosts; on Windows NT-based systems (including 2000, XP and Vista), %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Open the file in a text editor and add a few lines like so:

216.127.69.124 mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 chucker.mystfans.com
216.127.69.124 mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystcommunity.com
216.127.69.124 www.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 en.mystlore.com
216.127.69.124 linguists.bahro.com

On Mac OS X, you also need to flush the hosts cache using dscacheutil -flushcache on 10.5 Leopard, or lookupd -flushcache on 10.4 Tiger and older (otherwise, the change won’t take place immediately).

Afterwards, launch your browser and the URLs should work as usual.