The long pause

I disappeared from the Blogosphere for a while. No need to panic, the project is going very well. Pretty much everything is working on SQL Server now. My intent was to record in the blog everything that was going on as it was happening. Instead, I got so wrapped up in working on the code I didn't have much energy left to do the blogging. My intent now is to get my work rolled into the MediaWiki baseline once MediaWiki 1.10 releases. The MediaWiki principals seem to be working fairly arduously on making the 1.10 release happen, and don't need to be distracted by worrying about incorporating completely new capabilities that come at them from out of the blue. Not surprisingly, there turned out to be a little bit of scope creep. MediaWiki doesn't seem to get much use on Microsoft Windows servers, so I discovered some things that needed to be done to make that work better too -- like getting the ImageMagick and Batik image management working (by default they don't). I also needed to work to get HTML Tidy working. It wasn't until pretty late in the game that I realized that was even going to be necessary. In particular, there's a lot of templates used in Wikipedia and related sites that just plain won't work right now without HTML Tidy. Having posted this latest status report now, it remains for me to go back and retrace the steps it took to get to a working MediaWiki engine on Microsoft SQL Server in upcoming blog posts.