User:Ingomueller.net/Diary

From the ALSA wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

This is my kind of wiki diary where I log my changes to the wiki. If you want to contact me, just add a note on my my talk page. Indent your post with ~~~~:, which will be replaced by the date and your username.

Contents

2007-02-08 - Improvement of my howto

As discussed on the mailinglist, I have to add a comment to the howto i recently wrote on when the new defined controls appear (done). First I have to find out when it happens :-) I also want to write a general page about the softvol plugin and maybe an howto like How to control the volume for every application seperately. Any ideas or help appriciated! Ingo

2007-01-25/28 - Software + FAQ categories

I added a new Category:Software and put all article about software somehow related to ALSA in there. Later, I want to refine this categorisation into "Sound servers", "Music editors", "Players" and so on. I also worked on the Category:FAQ. I merged the two versions of the old FAQ structure and the new one (not 100% complete), which coexisted for some time and therefor developped seperately. There are more things I still want to do with the FAQ page, like moving rather rarely answered questions elsewhere and concentrate on the really frequent ones. Details about what I think that remains to be done can be found at the discussion page. Ingo

2007-01-11 - My first article

I wrote my first article and I'm quite proud of it! It's called How to use softvol to control the master volume. I wrote this howto, because I had the very same problem, when I first had to do with ALSA on the HTPC I'm building right now. I was looking for a solution for more than two whole days although it is quite easy to set up, once you know what you have to do. I hope, this howto helps to save time for some people. That's why I posted links to this article on several internet forums that I stumbled upon on my original research.

If you read the article, please leave a note about what you think about it! If you have any idea how to improve it, please let me know or just do it yourself. That'd be awesome! Ingo

2007-01-07/08 - More categories

I created the following categories:

  1. Category:Documentation
  2. Category:Installation
  3. Category:Troubleshooting
  4. Category:OSS
  5. Category:MIDI
  6. Category:FAQ
  7. Category:alsa-utils
  8. Category:alsa-tools
  9. Category:ALSA packages

When I populated the categories, I thought, that the Category:FAQ needs some work. Well, everything needs a lot of work, but I know what can be done here ;-) At the moment, most FAQs exist twice: once at their old adress (e.g. FAQ031) and once on the new page FAQ. The first thing to do is update one version if the other has been changed. (done) The second would be to think about how to organized the FAQs in general. I don't know whether it is better to have all FAQs on one page or to have an own page for every single one of them. Another idea might be, that there is a categorized list of the FAQs on FAQ and the answers are on new pages, one for each category. If anybody has any ideas about that topic, please let me know. Ingo

2007-01-06 - Plugins, Glossary and Howtos

Today I populated the categories Category:ALSA plugins, Category:Glossary and Category:Howto. Like the module and sound cards categories, I created an index page for the plugins. In future, there should be one little sentence behind every plugin telling what the plugin does in short.

What I thought about the three categories was above all, that there is not a lot of (good) content. Only a very few terms are explained in the glossary page and most of the howtos are just big patch works. There are some exceptions though! About the plugins: only 6 of 24 them have even a page. I hope that there are people out there who know the topic and will (re)write some of the articles! Ingo

2007-01-04 - Modules/Soundcards

As a next step, I want to put every page in a category. I already started with the modules and sound cards. I created the categories Category:ALSA modules and Category:Sound cards as well as the pages ALSA modules and Sound cards. These two pages are a bit like the indexes of the according categories, but they are more flexible. Before, these lists were found in AlsaModules, AlsaDrivers and SoundCards.

I also included the information from Quick Install - module, Setting up modprobe and kmod support - module and The module options for module into page of the module module (they existed for about 10 modules). That way, everything about one module is concentrated in one place.

For some of the pages in the two categoreis, I didn't know whether they are really modules, or maybe have been modules earlier, whose work is done by other modules now, or they are a sound card or chip. I created the categories with the information of the old pages (AlsaDrivers, AlsaModules and SoundCards) as well as http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/index.php?vendor=All#matrix. If someone knows more about what a module is and what not, please correct me! Thanks!

What remains to be done is seperate even more information about specific problems (modules, sound cards...) on one side and general documentation and howtos on the other. This seperation is not done with putting pages in categories. Unfortunately, specific problems are described in pages about general problems and vice versa. But its a start... Ingo

2007-01-01 - System messages

I changed some of the system messages, the ones that used the built in template {{SITENAME}}. {{SITENAME}} contained ALSA, which was not perfect in every place. For example, there was a link named About ALSA on the bottom of every page. Now it's called About the ALSA wiki. IMO, this makes much more sense. The other changes were very similar. I replaced {{SITENAME}} by ALSA wiki, the ALSA wiki or The ALSA wiki, depending on the context. I hope these changes are usefull. Tell me, if you think otherwise. Ingo

2006-12-30

Today, I reorganized the pages about this wiki and about alsa. Basicly, I seperated stuff from one thing from the other. Here is what I did:

About Alsa

About this wiki

Copyright - the old page, but wrong name space and not correct (?) (see ALSA_talk:Copyrights)

Todo

What still needs to be done on this subject is IMO:

2006-12-26

I just made most of the changes I thought about (see section below). Here's what remains to do:

Please tell what you think about what I already did and about my future plans! Ingo

2006-12-23 - Refactoring of help and about pages

I think a refactoring of the whole site would be a good thing, but let's start small :-) To begin with, I wanted to clean up the pages about this wiki, about wikis in general and the formatting help pages. I listed the concerned pages below (add more if you think the list is incomplete).

I tried to put every information where it belongs (which I think is a very important thing to do): help pages into the help namespace, pages about this wiki into the alsa namespace. If pages are moved, every internal links pointing to that page sould be changed, too, and the old articles should redirect to the new place, so old links from the outside continue to work.

How to use a wiki

Site Planed changes
  • merge into Help:Introduction into what a wiki is (done)
  • links to Help:Editing, Help:Discussion and external sites (done)
I don't think that these pages are needed. To keep old links working, redirect to Help:Introduction (done)
redirect -> Help:Editing (done)
move to Help:* namespace (done)
redirect -> ALSA:About# Transfer_from_the_old_wiki_2006/2007 (done)
No changes (maybe add a few things like tables...)

About this wiki

ALSA:About

The link on the bottom of every page should lead to an article about this wiki. Is it possible to change that link to the page ALSA:About_this_wiki? (done) On that page, of course, there has to be a link to an article about what alsa is! On that page, there should be a note about the old wiki and changes, e.g. users, syntax... (done)

General discussions

General discussions about this wiki (like this very post) should be hold in one place. Most of them have been hold in the ThisWiki page before, but that's not really what the title promises and it should be in the ALSA namespace, I think. Maybe either ALSA:ThisWiki or ALSA:Community_Portal are candidates or maybe a new article only for that purpose should be created.

Update: I decided that ALSA:Community Portal will be the place for general discussions. I moved most of them to that page and created links to other general discussions that I didn't move.

2006-12-22 - Checking transfer to new wiki

To check, wether all pages have been transfered, I wrote a small php script. It may be ugly, but it did the job. A file named alsa.opensrc.org all pages.txt has to be in the same folder containing the link of the pages to check (I created it with my editor using regexes).

The check was successfull except the pages listed below. The pages marked as Spam and Empty pages don't have to be transfered, obviously. I'm not sure about the other ones, though. I transfered the user pages, but moved them to the user namespace (ie User:ingomueller.net). Later, I created a link from the old page to the new one (ingomueller.net -> User:ingomueller.net). I created links to special pages (ie RecentChanges -> Special:Recentchanges), but two of them are not available with Mediawiki. I think we can just ignore them. Last thing: I discovered that some links would not work directly in the old wiki. I had to replace %2F with a slash in order to make them work. In the new wiki, the work with the slash, but not with %2F. I don't know what to do about it. Maybe it's my browser. Probably we can ignore it, too.

So, what do you think about it? Any ideas appriciated!

Ingo

My script 

 <?php
 
 # load file list
 $pages = file("alsa.opensrc.org all pages.txt");
 
 # $pages = array( "http://alsa2.opensrc.org/Main_Page" );
 
 foreach ($pages as $page) {
     
     # remove nl chars
     $page = trim($page);
     
     # get content of file via output buffer
     ob_start();
     readfile($page, "r");
     $output = ob_get_contents();
     ob_end_clean();
     
     # check if not existant
     $is_wiki = strpos( $output, "<!-- end content -->");        # every wiki page contains that string
     $is_empty = strpos( $output, "<p>(There is currently no text in this page)");        #empty wiki pages contain that string
     
     if ($is_wiki === FALSE || $is_empty !== FALSE) {
         echo "<font color=red><a href=\"$page\">$page</a> not found.</font><br />\r\n";
     } else {
         echo "<font color=green><a href=\"$page\">$page</a> found.</font><br />\r\n";
     }
 }
 ?>

Link syntax broken

Function unavailable

Spam

Empty pages

Retrieved from "http://alsa.opensrc.org/User:Ingomueller.net/Diary"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Toolbox