The countdown is at D minus 10.

Does that make sense? Is that an actual way to say that? What I mean is that there are ten days left until the hard launch. I wanted to put it in a way that sounded a bit more, uh, dramatic, I guess, but I'm not sure if what I wrote really... means anything.

Anyway, yeah, when I wrote yesterday's blog post I realized that I had eleven days left until the hard launch, and I sort of half-heartedly decided that (maybe) I would try to write a blog post every day for the final ten days remaining. Of course, that would mean I'd have to actually do something on the site each of those days, but with so little time left that's something I wanted to do anyway.

So what did I do today?

Well... back in August when I wrote a blog post about the Wongery's domain name(s), I mentioned that I had also registered the domain wongery.wiki, but that I wasn't sure where to direct it, and I raised the notion of perhaps making "a sort of a metawongery wiki, sort of like the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki?" At the time, I was just throwing out the idea off the top of my head... but as I considered the idea, I realized there was a lot of merit to it. As I said in another blog post a few weeks ago, "there are several projectspace articles that I wasn't quite sure whether to put in the Central Wongery or the Public Wongery—the Wongery Manual of Style; an article about Wongery Conventions, etc.—that I think it would make a lot of sense to put in a Metawongery wiki instead." Furthermore, it would be a good centralized place to put templates used by multiple wikis as well. When adding the blog to the interwiki table I became curious about the significance of the some of the fields of the table and, reading the documentation, became aware of the ability to transclude templates from other MediaWiki installations; that means if I put the correct the settings in the interwiki table I could have templates in the Metawongery used by any other wikis on the site. Duplicating templates isn't a big deal when there are only two wikis that would use them, the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery, but when and if I start making Private Wongeries, it'll be a lot easier to let them use templates from the Metawongery than to copy all the applicable templates to every wiki manually. For that matter, it may make sense to centralize the interwiki table itself, and to set the interwiki table of the Metawongery as a global interwiki that any of the site's other wikis could refer to.

So, anyway, implementing the Metawongery is one of the many remaining items that I wanted to have done before the hard launch... and I figured I may as well go ahead and do it. So I did. The Metawongery now exists, at www.wongery.com/meta. There's nothing there yet, apart from the main page, and its interwiki is not yet set up as global interwiki, but the wiki itself is there. I'll try to get a few articles up there and move a few universal templates over before the hard launch, but no promises as to how much.

(Many of the previous blog posts contain redlinks to "meta" articles that I assumed would be in the Central Wongery's projectspace but that it now makes more sense to put in the Metawongery; at some point I'll go back and correct those links. Going back and doing a bit of light copyediting of the old blog posts is another item on my to-do list anyway, especially now that I have a more user-friendly interface to do that, and I'll just fold fixing those links in as part of that—though again, I make no guarantees as to exactly when I'm going to get that done.

Anyway. The countdown is at D minus 10.

No, wait. D minus 10 days and counting. Yeah, that sounds better. I'm still not totally sure that's the right way to put it, but at least I think it's a bit of an improvement. That's how I'll put it for the remaining countdown posts. D minus [math]\displaystyle{ X }[/math] days and counting, where [math]\displaystyle{ X in mathbbz | 1 leq X leq 9 }[/math]. Unless I think of a still better way to put it.

[Eh, okay, math formulas aren't showing up correctly in blog posts. Probably something to do with the parameters of the API call. Yet another thing to figure out.]