Miscellaneous

Content management systems, Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal offer many features, frequently too many. However I've yet to find an easy way to create footnotes for citations without using either purpose built plugin, or either one with too much additional functionality, as a Latex editor would offer.

The middle ground is to use HTML superscript and anchors. While I wouldn't want to create pages of footnotes content in this fashion, it is useful for the occasional page which requires citations.

This page, Footnotes in HTML describes it better than I can, but the basics are below.

The HTML comprises of the text with a superscript link, and a corresponding anchor with the reference. Easy enough once you get the hang of it, and no plug is needed.

 

The link in the body of the text:

Text with a footnote.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup>

and the corresponding footnote at the bottom of the page:

<sup id="fn1">1. [Text of footnote 1]<a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup>
 

The Wetland Wiki, with almost 200 articles was successful for a few years, but writing constant wiki style articles and combating incessant spam was tiring. Combining this with the improving coverage on wetands at Wikipedia, made it time to close the Wiki. Short sightedly, I closed the wiki rather than than maintaining it, leaving me with an dated, unsupported version of Mediawiki, with some good articles residing in the database. Mediawiki offers a bunch of export options, but all I had was the MySQL datbase. What to do? Goto Stackoverflow of course! I Found the following snippet of code to run in phpmyadmin, which extracts the last revision of the page text and title, which can be easily exported to a csv file. The csv still retains the wiki styling, but with a little effort, all page data can be retrieved. The Sql is as follows:

SELECT page_title, page_touched, old_text
FROM revision,page,text
WHERE revision.rev_id=page.page_latest
AND text.old_id=revision.rev_text_id;

The Wetland Wiki was published under the Creative Commons, and the csv file of all of the articles in a semi readable format is is available here: Wetland Wiki extract

MediaWiki export
MediaWiki export

 

 

Driving through town I saw a NJ license plate devoted to conserving the Meadowlands, below is a photo from the NJ DMV, proceeds from the sale of the plate will be used to fund the Meadowlands Conservation Trust.

From the Trust: " The unique design of the plate combines human and natural elements to show our constant interaction in this urban wetland complex. This plate will help establish incentive programs to encourage land donations and protect open space to improve accessibility and recreational opportunities for the Hackensack Meadowlands and River Watershed."

Meadowlands..... you've come a long way baby.

Meadowlands License Plate

Wetlands in the News

19 April 2024