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Mediawiki: Remove External Arrow from Links

My main job here at rPath, Inc. is to document our technologies via the rPath Documentation Wiki. For this wiki, we use a Mediawiki Appliance. For those that don’t know, the “appliance” I refer to here is a software appliance…something rPath technologies make easy to maintain and create. For more information see the definition of a software appliance here.

Moving on, I was ANNOYED by the fact that you have a small arrow “” that appears beside any image that references an external URL or any link that does the same. This is fine to let people know that links will take them to a different page…but what I was trying to do was to make a PDF Icon have the same link as the URL it was sitting beside:

So in the above image, if one clicked on the PDF icon or the “Application to Appliance: A Hands-on Guide (PDF)” the PDF would download.

Mediawiki doesn’t provide a fantastic way for you to do this. However, after some snooping around via google, I found a fairly easy way to make things happen.

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What’s Up With the New Look?

As you might have noticed, we have a new look currently. This theme is a temporary one as I build the next one from scratch. I’ve been theme shopping for the last couple of months and noticed that there isn’t a whole heckuva lot to choose from that a million people aren’t using already. So the only way that I can make sure that Yet Another Linux Blog is unique is if I do the theme myself. Of course, this means that I have to learn a whole new set of .tpl files, new CSS calls, and start sketching things out on a sketchpad that I haven’t bought yet 😛

If anyone has any feedback on the current theme, please let me know…I can change it pretty easily or hack it to pieces on a whim.

I’ve been somewhat busy having launched http://mypclinuxos.com as a PCLinuxOS projects site to assist the PCLinuxOS development team with various projects and to provide the community with a platform on which to develop their own projects. Therefore, I haven’t had a ton of time to blog as of late. I should be back to a normal schedule within the next month or so. If not, this blog might go dormant for a while until I am able to relenquish my administrative duties at mypclinuxos.com. I have a review of a server distro I started a few weeks ago, but I haven’t finished it yet. Hopefully, I will be able to get that review out in the next week or so. I won’t hold my breath, I’ve got a ton of stuff going on at the projects site that keeps me oh so busy. Thanks for reading and sticking with me through the lean parts of this blog. Cheers.

Devnet

mv elitism /dev/null

In the beginning of things, open source was about open everything. I remember joining an irc channel # on efnet back in 1993 and chatting with people who could make things happen with computers…really make things happen. Coders, managers, hackers…they were all there and a tight nit core of about 6 of us stayed in touch for about 7 years until we went our separate ways and began to use irc less and less. The thing that I remember the most is the fact that when I joined their little group, I was a complete and total n00b. Not just a n00b to Open Source…but to computers altogether. I had a Texas Instruments computer back in 1985 but only messed with that for about a year. Mice were new to me…I didn’t know ANYTHING at all. In the short time that I began chatting on irc, I was shown how to do things. When I didn’t know how to do something, I could count on one of the guys or girls in the channel helping me to solve my problem within a matter of minutes. These people stepped down off of their level of operation long enough to educate me in the ways of the open source.

I look fondly back at this time and have spoken about it before…not because I don’t think something like this exists now…just that I think it is a rarity. There was a time when this “spirit of open source” was all about educating and furthering the program/app that you were working on. Now it seems that when a new user comes in to any channel on irc or forum, they are told off with a hearty RTFM (Read the ‘Friendly’ Manual).

Where did this Elitism come from? Where and when did Linux and open source become about the mentality “you must be this knowledgeable to ride?” It pains me to see people do this to new users…distancing themselves from potential advocates of open source…zealous ones at that. It’s a real testament to some of these new users STILL wanting to plug open source and Linux, despite being squashed by elitists in forums.

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