Stardust | Starbeamrainbowlabs

Ducks

Heya!

I like ducks. Have some ducks:

Some duck wallpaper

(Source: Unknown. If you're the creator and can prove it, comment below and I'll attribute properly)

....teaching is not easy, and I don't like preparing content week-by-week (i.e. preparing content to teach the next week) very much at all.

I recognise this is the longest break in blog posts there has been since I began this on 29th June 2014 (wow, it has been 10 years here already?!). Both energy and time are extraordinarily low at the moment (I have not had even a moment to work on my PhD corrections in over a month at this point).

However, there is hope that this is not a permanent state of affairs (and if I have anything to say about it, it won't be).

Hopefully in a few weeks things should improve to the point that I have energy to work on my PhD and post here again.

I've got several cool ideas for posts that I want to write:

Most obviously, I want to write a blog post about my experiences teaching
I've found a really neat solution to a 3-way split of a dataset in Tensorflow

And others that are a thing in the background.

Just a short check in to let everyone know that while I am very exhausted I am also very determined to keep this blog going as a permanent thing.

It's not much of a 10 year celebration, but if you've been reading here for a while I thank you SO MUCH for continuing to stick around, even if you don't comment.

There is always hope.

--Starbeamrainbowlabs

Teaching this September

Hello!

Believe it or not, I'm going to be teachificatinating a thing at University this semester, which starts at the end of this month and lasts until around December-ish time (yeah, I'm surprised too).

It's called Secure Digital Infrastructure, and I'll be teaching Linux and system administration skills, so that includes the following sorta-areas:

Bash (Learn your terminal (or command line))
Linux file and account permissions (no posts I could find yet - plenty of resources online tho)
Practical networking and web server configuration (see also The NSD Authoritative DNS Server: What, why, and how and part 2, An epic journey awaits: The hows and whys of DNS (and why DNS privacy is important), Securing a Linux Server Part 1: Firewall, and others)
Docker (see also Cluster, Part 10: Dockerisification | Writing Dockerfiles)
Clustering - at least the theory (see also Cluster Series List)
Reverse proxies (see also related posts: Securing your port-forwarded reverse proxy and the unreasonably popular How to set up a WebDav share with Nginx)

(related posts aren't necessarily the exact content I'm going to cover, but are related)

To this end, it is quite stressful and is taking significantly more energy than I expected to prepare for this.

I definitely want to talk about it here, but that will likely happen after the fact - probably some time in January or February.

Please be patient with me as I navigate this new and unexpected experience :-)

--Starbeamrainbowlabs

PhD Update 19: The Reckoning

The inevitability of all PhDs. At first it seems distant and ephemeral, but it is also the inescapable and unavoidable destination for all on the epic journey of the PhD.

Sit down and listen as I tell my own tale of the event I speak of.

I am, of course, talking about the PhD Viva. It differs from country to country, but here in the UK the viva is an "exam" that happens a few months after you have submitted your thesis (PhD Update 18: The end and the beginning). Unlike across the pond in the US, in the UK vivas are a much more private affair, with only you, the chair, and your internal and external examiners normally attending.

In my case, that was 2 externals (as I am also staff, ref Achievement get: Experimental Officer Position!), an internal, and of course the chair. I won't name them as I'm unsure of policy there, but they were experts in the field and very kind people.

I write this a few weeks removed from the actual event (see also my post on Fediscience at the time), and I thought that my viva itself deserved a special entry in this series dedicated to it.

My purpose in this post is to talk about my experience as honestly and candidly as I can, and offer some helpful advice from someone who has now been through the process.

The Structure

The viva itself took about 4 hours. It's actually a pretty complicated affair: all your examiners (both internal and external) have to read your thesis and come up with a list of questions (hidden from you of course). Then, on the day but before you enter the room they have to debate who is going to ask what to avoid duplication.

In practice this usually means that the examiners will meet in the morning to discuss, before having lunch and then convening for the actual viva bit where they ask the questions. In my case, I entered the room to meet the examiners and say hi, before leaving again for them to sort out who was going to ask what.

Then, the main part of the viva simply consists of you answering all the questions that they have for you. Once all the questions are answered, then the viva is done.

You are usually allowed a copy of your thesis in one form or another to assist you while answering their questions. The exact form this will take varies from institution to institution, so I recommended always checking this with someone in charge (e.g. the Doctoral College in my case) well in advance - you don't want to be hit with paperwork and confusion minutes before your viva is scheduled to start!

After the questions, you leave the room again for the examiners to deliberate over what the outcome will be, before calling you back into the room to give you the news.

Once they have done this: the whole thing is over and you can go sleep (trust me, you will not want to do anything else).

My experience

As I alluded to in the aforementioned post on fediscience (a node in the fediverse), I found the viva a significantly intense experience - and one I'm not keen on repeating any time soon. I strongly recommend having someone nearby as emotional support for after the viva and during those periods when you have to step out of the room. I am not ashamed to admit that there were tears after the exam had ended.

More of the questions than I expected focused on the 'big picture' kinda stuff, like how my research questions linked in with the rest of the thesis, and how the thesis flowed. I was prepared for technical questions -- and there were some technical questions -- but the 'fluffy stuff' kinda questions caught me a little off guard. For example, there were some questions about my introduction and how while I introduced the subject matter well, the jump into the technical stuff with the research questions was quite jarring, with concepts mentioned that weren't introduced beforehand.

To this end, I can recommend looking over the 'big picture' stuff beforehand so that you are prepared for questions that quiz you on your motivations for doing your research in the first place and question different aspects research questions.

It can also feel quite demoralising, being questioned for hours on what has been your entire life for multiple years. It can feel like all you have done is pointless, and you need to start over. While it is sure that you could improve upon your methods if you started from scratch, remember that you have worked hard to get to this point! You have discovered things that were not known to the world before your research began, and that is a significant accomplishment!

Try not to think too hard about the corrections you will need to make once the viva is done. Institutions differ, but in my case it is the job of the chair to compile the list of corrections and then send them to you (in one form or another). The list of corrections - even if they are explained to you verbally when you go back in to receive the result - may surprise you.

Outcome

As I am sure that most of you reading this are wondering, what was my result?! Before I tell you, I will preface the answer to your burning question with a list of the possible outcomes:

Pass with no corrections (extremely rare)
Pass with X months corrections (common, where X is a multiple of 3)
Fail (also extremely rare)

In my case, I passed with corrections!

It is complicated by the fact that while the panel decided that I had 6 months of corrections to do, I am not able to spend 100% of my time doing them. To this end, it is currently undefined how long I will have to do them - paperwork is still being sorted out.

The reasons for this are many, but chief among them is that I will be doing some teaching in September - more to come on my experience doing that in a separate post (series?) just as soon as I have clarified what I can talk about and what I can't.

I have yet to recieve a list of the corrections themselves (although I have not checked my email recently as I'm on holiday now as I write this), but it is likely that the corrections will include re-running some experiments - a process I have begun already.

Looking ahead

So here we are. I have passed my viva with corrections! This is not the end of this series - I will keep everyone updated in future posts as I work through the corrections.

I also intend to write a post or two about my experience learning to teach - a (side)quest that I am currently persuing in my capacity as Experimental Officer (research is still my focus - don't worry!)

Hopefully this post has provided some helpful insight into the process of the PhD viva - and my experience in mine.

The viva is not a destination: only a waypoint on a longer journey.

If you have any questions, I am happy to anwser them in the comments, and chat on the fediverse and via other related channels.

PhD Update 18: The end and the beginning

Hello! It has been a while. Things have been most certainly happening, and I'm sorry I haven't had the energy to update my blog here as often as I'd like. Most notably, I submitted my thesis last week (gasp!)! This does not mean the end of this series though - see below.

Before we continue, here's our traditional list of past posts:

Since last time, that detecting persuasive tactic challenge has ended too, and we have a paper going through at the moment: BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge.

Theeeeeeeeeeeeesis

Hi! A wild thesis appeared! Final counts are 35,417 words, 443 separate sources, 167 pages, and 50 pages of bibliography - making that 217 pages in total. No wonder it took so long to write! I submitted at 2:35pm BST on Friday 10th May 2024.

I. can. finally. rest.

It has been such a long process, and taken a lot of energy to complete it, especially since large amounts of formal academic writing isn't usually my thing. I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks especially to my supervisor for being there from beginning to end and beyond to support me through this endeavour - and everyone else who has helped out in one way or another (you know who you are).

Next step is the viva, which will be some time in July. I know who my examiners are going to be, but I'm unsure whether it would be wise to say here. Between now and then, I want to ~~stalk~~ investigate my examiners' research histories, which should give me an insight into their perspective on my research.

Once the viva is done, I expect to have a bunch of corrections to do. Once those are completed, I will to the best of my ability be releasing my thesis for all to read for free. I still need to talk to people to figure out how to do that, but rest assured that if you can't get enough of my research via the papers I've written for some reason, then my thesis will not be far behind.

Coming to the end of my PhD and submitting my thesis has been surprisingly emotionally demanding, so I thank everyone who is still here for sticking around and being patient as I navigate these unfamiliar events.

Researchy things

While my PhD may be coming to a close (I still can't believe this is happening), I have confirmed that I will have dedicated time for research-related activities. Yay!

This means, of course, that as one ending draws near, a new beginning is also starting. Today's task after writing this post is to readificate around my chosen idea to figure out where there's a gap in existing research for me to make a meaningful contribution. In a very real way, it's almost like I am searching for directions as I did in my very first post in this series.

My idea is connected to the social media research that I did previously on multimodal natural language processing of flooding tweets and images with respect to sentiment analysis (it sounded better in my head).

Specifically, I think I can do better than just sentiment analysis. Imagine an image of a street that's partially underwater. Is there a rescue team on a boat rescuing someone? What about the person on the roof waving for help? Perhaps it's a bridge that's about to be swept away, or a tree that has fallen down? Can we both identify these things in images and map them to physical locations?

Existing approaches to e.g. detect where the water is in the image are prone to misidentifying water that is infact where it should be for once, such as in rivers and lakes. To this end, I propose looking for the people and things in the water rather than the water itself and go for a people-centred approach to flood information management.

I imagine that while I'll probably use data from social media I already have (getting a hold of new data from social media is very difficult at the moment) - filtered for memes and misinformation this time - if you know of any relevant sources of data or datasets, I'm absolutely interested and please get in touch. It would be helpful but not required if it's related to a specific natural disaster event (I'm currently looking at floods, branching out to others is absolutely possible and on the cards but I will need to submit a new ethics form for that before touching any data).

Another challenge I anticipate is that of unlabelled data. It is often the case that large volumes of data are generated during an unfolding natural disaster, and processing it all can be a challenge. To this end, somehow I want my approach here to make sense of unlabelled images. Of course, generalist foundational models like CLIP are great, but lack the ability to be specific and accurate enough with natural disaster images.

I also intend that this idea would be applicable to images from a range of sources, and not just with respect to social media. I don't know what those sources could be just yet, but if you have some ideas, please let me know.

Finally, I am particularly interested if you or someone you know are in any way involved in natural disaster management. What kinds of challenges do you face? Would this be in any way useful? Please do get in touch either in the comments below or sending me an email (my email address is on the homepage of this website).

Persuasive tactics challenge

The research group I'm part of were successful in completing the SemEval Task 4: Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Memes! I implemented the 'late fusion engine', which is a fancy name for an algorithm that uses in basic probability to combine categorical predictions from multiple different models depending on how accurate each model was on a per-category basis.

I'm unsure of the status of the paper, but I think it's been through peer-review so you can find that here: BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge.

I wasn't the lead on that challenge, but I believe the lead person (a friend of mine, if you are reading this and want me to link to somewhere here get in touch) on that project will be going to mexico to present it.

Teaching

I'm still not sure what I can say and what I can't, but starting in september I have been asked to teach a module on basic system administration skills. It's a rather daunting prospect, but I have a bunch of people much more experienced than me to guide me through the process. At the moment the plan is for 21 lecture-ish things, 9 labs, and the assessment stuff, so I'm rather nervous about preparing all of this content.

Of course, as a disclaimer nothing written in this section should be taken as absolute. (Hopefully) more information at some point, though unfortunately I doubt that I would be allowed to share the content created given it's University course material.

As always though, if there's a specific topic that lies anywhere within my expertise that you'd like explaining, I'm happy to write a blog post about it (in my own time, of course).

Conclusion

We've taken a little look at what is been going on since I last posted, and while this post has been rather talky (will try for some kewl graphics next time!), nonetheless I hope this has been an interesting read. I've submitted my thesis, started initial readificating for my next research project - which we've explored the ideas here, helped out a group research challenge project thingy, and been invited to do some teaching!

Hopefully the next post in this series will come out on time - long-term the plan is to absolutely continue blogging about the research I'm doing.

Until next time, the journey continues!

(Oh yeah! and finally finally, to the person who asked a question by email about this old post (I think?), I'm sorry for the delay and I'll try to get back to you soon.)

Defining AI: Word embeddings

Hey there! It's been a while. After writing my thesis for the better part of a year, I've been getting a bit burnt out on writing - so unfortunately I had to take a break from writing for this blog. My thesis is almost complete though - more on this in the next post in the PhD update blog post series. Other higher-effort posts are coming (including the belated 2nd post on NLDL-2024), but in the meantime I thought I'd start a series on defining various AI-related concepts. Each post is intended to be relatively short in length to make them easier to write.

Normal scheduling will resume soon :-)

Banner showing the text 'Defining AI' on top on transclucent white vertical stripes against a voronoi diagram in white against a pink/purple background. 3 progressively larger circles are present on the right-hand side.

As you can tell by the title of this blog post, the topic for today is word embeddings.

AI models operate fundamentally on numerical values and mathematics - so naturally to process text one has to encode said text into a numerical format before it can be shoved through any kind of model.

This process of converting text to a numerically-encoded value is called word embedding!

As you might expect, there are many ways of doing this. Often, this involves looking at what other words a given word often appears next to. This could be for example framed as a task in which a model has to predict a word given the words immediately before and after it in a sentence, and then take the output of the last layer before the output layer as the embedding (word2vec).

Other models use matrix math to calculate this instead, producing a dictionary file as an output (GloVe | paper). Still others use large models that are trained to predict randomly masked words, and process entire sentences at once (BERT and friends) - though these are computationally expensive since every bit of text you want to embed has to get pushed through the model.

Then there's contrastive learning approaches. More on contrastive learning later in the series if anyone's interested, but essentially it learns by comparing pairs of things. This can lead to a higher-level representation of the input text, which can increase performance in some circumstances, and other fascinating side effects that I won't go into in this post. Chief among these is CLIP (blog post).

The idea here is that semantically similar words wind up having similar sorts of numbers in their numerical representation (we call this a vector). This is best illustrated with a diagram:

Words embedded with GloVe and displayed in a heatmap

I used GloVe to embed some words with GloVe (really easy to use since it's literally just a dictionary), and then used cosine distance to compute the similarity between the different words. Once done, I plotted this in a heatmap.

As you can see, rain and water are quite similar (1 = identical; 0 = completely different), but rain and unrelated are not really alike at all.

That's about the long and short of word embeddings. As always with these things, you can go into an enormous amount of detail, but I have to cut it off somewhere.

Are there any AI-related concepts or questions you would like answering? Leave a comment below and I'll write another post in this series to answer your question.

Website update: Share2Fediverse, and you can do it too!

Heya! Got another short port for you here. You night notice that on all posts now there's a new share button (those buttons that take you to difference places with a link to this site to share it elsewhere) that looks like this:

The 5-pointed rainbow fediverse logo

If you haven't seen it before, this is the logo for the Fediverse, a decentralised network of servers and software that all interoperate (find out more here: https://fedi.tips/).

Since creating my Mastodon account, I've wanted some way to allow everyone here to share my posts on the Fediverse if they feel that way inclined. Unlike other centralised social media platforms like Reddit etc though, the Fediverse doesn't have a 'central' server that you can link to.

To this end, you need a landing page to act as a middleman. There are a few options out there already (e.g. share2fedi), but I wanted something specific and static, so I built my own solution. It looks like this:

(Above: A screenshot of Share2Fediverse.)

It's basically a bit of HTML + CSS for styling, a splash of Javascript to make the interface function and remember the instance + software you select for next time via localStorage.

Check it out at this demo link:

https://starbeamrainbowlabs.com/share2fediverse/#text=The%20fediverse%20is%20cool!%20%E2%9C%A8

Currently, it supports sharing to Mastodon, GNU Social, and Diaspora. As it turns out, finding the share url (e.g. for Mastodon on fediscience.org it's https://fediscience.org/share?text=some%20text%20here) is more difficult than it sounds, as I haven't found it to be well advertised. I'd love to add e.g. Pixelfed, Kbin, GoToSocial, Pleroma, and more.... but I need the share URL! If you know the share URL for any piece of Fediverse software, please do leave a comment below.

If you're interested in the source code, you can find it here:

https://github.com/sbrl/Share2Fediverse/

...if you'd really like to help out, you could even open a pull request! The file you want to edit is src/lib/software_db.mjs - though if you leave a comment here or open an issue I'll pick it up and add any requests.

See you on the Fediverse! o/

500 posts - thank you!

Looking up into a blossom tree against a blue sky.

500 posts is a lot. When I started writing back in 2014, I never imagined that I was make it to this milestone. I've thought for a while about what I wanted to do to celebrate, but couldn't think of anything specific - so I wanted to thank everyone who has supported me so far in my journey through University - first in my undergraduate course, then in my MSc course, and now in my PhD.

It was Rob Miles that first encouraged me to start a blog in the first year of my undergraduate course. A few weeks later, and I had gone from a coming soon page to building starbeamrainbowlabs.com, followed closely by this blog which I put together piece by piece.

The backend is actually written in PHP - though it is on my (seemingly endless :P) todo list to rewrite it as it's not particularly well written. I've made a start on this already by refactoring the commenting system (and adding more statistics), but I haven't touched the blog itself and the main website (particularly the CSS) much yet.

In total, over the last 499 posts (I'm still writing this post as of the time of typing) I've written 347,256 words in total, counted by doing cat *.md | tr -d -- '-{}\[\]();=><' | wc -w on all the markdown sources of the posts I've written. This is a mind boggling number! I suspect it's somewhat inflated by the code I include in my blog posts though.

On these, I've received 192 (probably) genuine top-level comments that aren't spam (not counting replies, which are difficult to count with jq, as the replies parameter isn't always present in my backend JSON files I store comments in). Each and every one of these has been helpful, and given me motivation to continue writing here - especially more recently on my PhD Update series.

I might have missed some spam comments, so do get in touch if you spot one.

From my first post way back on 29th June 2014 to this post in the present spans exactly 7 years, 10 months, 13 days, and 8 hours (or 2874 days and 8 hours), averaging 5 days 17 hours between each post overall.

I would like to thank everyone who has supported me on this incredible journey - especially my personal supervisor and also my PhD supervisor - both of whom have continuously assisted me with issues both large and small at all times of the day and year. The entire Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull - members both past and present - have all been very kind and helpful, and I'm deeply grateful to have had such a welcoming place to be.

Finally, thank you for reading. While I don't write posts on my blog here expecting that anyone will read them, it's amazing to see and hear about people finding them helpful :D

I can't say where I'm headed next after my PhD (the end of which is still some time away), but I can say that I'm committed to posting on this blog - so it won't be going anywhere any time soon :P

If there's a specific topic you'd like me to cover (and I haven't already done so), please do leave a comment below.

A ladybird in a hawthorn bush.

Website Update: Tools section

A while ago I noticed that the tools section of my website was horribly outdated, so recently I decided to do something about it. It was still largely displaying tools from when I still used Windows as my primary operating system, which was a long time ago now!

The new revision changes it to display icons only instead of icons and screenshots, as screenshots aren't always helpful for some of the tools I now use - and it also makes it easier to keep the section updated in the future.

I also switched to use a tab separated values file (TSV file) instead of a JSON file for the backend data file that the tools list is generated from, as a TSV file is much more convenient to hand edit than a JSON file (JSON is awesome for lots of things and I use it all the time - it's just not as useful here). If you're interested, you can view the source TSV file here: tools.tsv

I'm still filling out the list (each item in the list also necessitates an update to my personal logo collection), but it's already a huge improvement from the old tools list. Things like GitHub's Atom IDE, Ubuntu, Mozilla Firefox, and KeePass2 are currently my daily drivers - so it's great to have them listed there.

Check out the new tools section here: https://starbeamrainbowlabs.com/#tools

New website for Pepperminty Wiki

By now, Pepperminty Wiki is quite probably my longest running project - and I'm absolutely committed to continuing to support and improve it over time (I use it to host quite a lot of very important information myself).

As part of this, one of the things I'm always looking to improve is the installation process and the first impression users get when they first visit Pepperminty Wiki. Currently, this has a GitHub repository. This is great (as it shows people that we're open-source), but it isn't particularly user-friendly for those who are less technically inclined.

To this end, I've built a shiny new website to introduce people to Pepperminty Wiki and the features it has to offer. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I realised that actually despite the fact that I haven't yet incremented the version number to v1.0 yet (as of the time of posting the latest stable release is v0.22), Pepperminty Wiki is actually pretty mature, easy to deploy and use, and stable.

The new website for Pepperminty Wiki (link below)

(Above: The new Pepperminty Wiki website. Check it out here!)

The stability is a new one for me, as it isn't something I've traditionally put much of a focus on - instead focusing on educational purposes. Development of Pepperminty Wiki has sort of fallen into a pattern of 2-3 releases per year - each of which is preceded by one or more beta releases. I always leave at least 1 week between releasing a beta and the subsequent stable release to give myself and beta testers (of which Pepperminty Wiki has some! If you're reading this, I really appreciate it) time to spot any last-minute issues.

Anyway, the website can be found here: https://peppermint.mooncarrot.space/

Share it with your friends! :D

The initial plan was to buy a domain name like pepperminty.wiki for it, but after looking into the prices (~£36.29 per year) I found it was waaay too expensive for a project that I'm not earning a penny from working on (of course, if you're feeling that way inclined I have a Liberapay setup if you'd like to contribute towards server costs, but it's certainly not required).

Instead, I used a subdomain of one of my existing domains, mooncarrot.space (I use this one mostly for personal web app instances on my new infrastructure I'm blogging about in my cluster series), which is a bit shorter and easier to spell/say than starbeamrainbowlabs.com if you're not used to it.

After a few false starts, I settled on using Eleventy as my static site generator of choice. I'm not making use of all it's features (not even close), but I've found it fairly easy to use and understand how it ticks - and also flexible enough such that it will work with me, rather attempting to force me into a particular way of working.

Honourable mentions here include Hugo (great project, but if I recall correctly I found it confusing and complicated to setup and use), documentation (an epic documentation generator for JS projects, but not suitable for this type of website - check out some of the docs I auto-generate via my Laminar CI setup: powahroot, applause-cli, terrain50).

The Pepperminty Wiki website light theme

(Above: The light theme for the website - which one you see depends on your system preference - I use prefers-colour-scheme here. Personally I prefer the dark theme myself, as it's easier on my eyes)

The experience of implementing the website was an interesting one. Never having built a website to 'sell' something before (even if this is for a thing that's free), I found the most challenging part of the experience determining what text to use to appropriately describe the features of Pepperminty Wiki.

From the beginning I sort of had a vision for how I wanted the website to look. I wanted an introductory bit at the top (with a screenshot at a cool angle!), followed by a bit that explained the features, the some screenshots with short descriptions, followed finally by a download section. I also wanted it to be completely mobile-friendly.

A screenshot of the website as viewed by a mobile device

(Above: A screenshot of the website as viewed by a mobile device. The Firefox Developer Tools were useful for simulating this)

For the most part, this panned out quite well. Keeping the design relatively simple enabled me to support mobile devices as I went along, with minimal tweaks needed at the end of the process (mobile support really needs to be part of the initial design process).

The cool screenshot at the top and the fancy orange buttons you'll see in various places across the site were especially fun to put together - the iterative process of adding CSS directives to bring the idea I had in my head as to how I wanted it to look to life was very satisfying. I think I'll use the same basic principle I used for the fancy buttons again elsewhere (try hovering over them and clicking them to see the animations).

The bottom of the website, showing the fancy orange buttons

(Above: The bottom of the website, showing the fancy orange buttons)

I did contemplate the idea of using a CSS framework for the website, but not having seriously used one before for a personal project combined with the advent of the CSS grid ended up in the decision to abandon the use of a framework once again (I'll learn one eventually, I'm sure ).

So far my experience with frameworks is that they just get in the way when you want to do something that wasn't considered when the framework was built, but I suppose that given their widespread use elsewhere that I really should make an effort to learn at least one framework to get that experience (any suggestions in the comments are welcome).

All in all the experience of building the Pepperminty Wiki website was an enjoyable one. It took a number of hours over a number of days to put together (putting the false starts aside), but I feel as though it was definitely worth it.

Find the website here: https://peppermint.mooncarrot.space/

If I end up moving it at a later date, I'll ensure there's a redirect in place so the above link won't break.

Found this useful? Got a comment about or a suggestion to improve the website? Comment below! I'd love to hear from you.

Pepperminty Wiki is 5 today!

....let's celebrate with the release of v0.20. I got a notification from my calendar system yesterday that Pepperminty Wiki's birthday is today, and since I did a beta release a few days ago and there haven't been any major issues, I thought I'd time the full release to coincide with its birthday.

I'm timing it from the first commit I ever made in Pepperminty Wiki's git repository. 5 years is a long time - and as a program Pepperminty Wiki has come such a long way since then.

Today, it's actually a really useful piece of open-source software, which is evidenced by the fact that people recommend it to other people on their own. Seeing such things and hearing about where it's used are really amazing to see - and give me lots of motivation to improve Pepperminty Wiki even more.

While the number of commits a project has isn't always an indicator of quality or how complete a project is, you can usually get a pretty good idea as to how much work has been done on a project by the number of commits it has (but of course, not always). At the time of writing Pepperminty Wiki has 1,415 commits, which is more than any other project I have ever worked on - past or present. The air quality web interface (which is now more of a general sensor web interface) is my 2nd place project unless I've missed one - and at 425 commits it doesn't even come close!

To summarise the features in the latest release:

🌜 New automatic dark mode in the default theme! Uses prefers-color-scheme under-the-hood
🌈 Added theme gallery! Read more here
⛵ Vastly improved search engine performance, with new advanced query syntax (with even more syntax along the way)
🚁 Accessibility improvements - if you're a screen-reader or accessibility tool user, I want to hear from you if you think anything (big or small!) could be improved!

Personally, I'm most proud of the optimisations to the search engine. I've actually blogged about how I did it in a 3 part series and tested it on a test wiki with ~5.9M words - while search times vary depending on your input (the new -exclude syntax will actually speed up queries) and your server hardware, a single word query for ~5.0M word wikis takes ~50ms O.o

Unfortunately, this does mean that the search index will need to be rebuilt under the new format - and will be slightly larger than before. To get a progress bar for this operation, go to the master settings and click the rebuild button.

Another notable change is the new 'mega-menu' style more menu:

That menu has been bothering me for a while, and thanks to the kind people on Reddit, I've now got a solution.

Note that you'll need to delete nav_links_extra from your peppermint.json in order for it to take effect.

Please also test the theme gallery in particular. It's brand-new in this release and quite complicated under-the-hood, so I'd appreciate some extra eyes on that.

As for when I'll release v1.0, I'm not sure. As a program, Pepperminty Wiki is certainly stable enough to be used in production scenarios today - so perhaps incrementing the version number to v1.0 would be a good idea to reflect that. At the same time though, there are a number of missing features - most notably watchlists and further improvements to the page history system - so I'm not sure when I'll be confident enough to bump it to v1.0.

Either way, I'm pretty sure that I'll keep working on Pepperminty Wiki for years to come - I have no plans to cease development at this time. While Pepperminty Wiki releases don't move at the most rapid of paces, I aim to get about 2 releases out per year about 6 months apart from each other.

Special thanks to @SeanFromIT for reporting a number of bugs which have been squashed.

If you use Pepperminty Wiki, tweet me @SBRLabs! I'd love to hear about how you're using it.

Lastly, don't forget to take a backup of your wiki before updating. While I've made every effort to squash bugs, you can never be too careful :P

Check out v0.20 here:

Pepperminty Wiki v0.20

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