Thanks to my geohashing expeditions over the last two months to a field between my house and Heathrow Airport while on my way to catch a flight, to a nature reserve near Woodstock where my crotch was attacked by a wasp, and this weekend to a field with a trigpoint in it near Tackley... I'm now officially in the "top hundred" geohashers worldwide whether measured either by number of expeditions or number of successful expeditions.
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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and ponytail, smiles for the camera while holding a French Bulldog whose tongue is lolling as she pants, in a field.
Of course, "top hundred" is a broad category. The curve is very skewed up this end: of the several thousand people who've ever created an account1 on geohashing.site, over half have undertaken only a single expedition. Whereas at the opposite end of the scale, I'd need to do around 20 times as many expeditions to catch up with epic adventurers like GeorgDerReisende and Fippe.2
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Map showing countries on both sides of the Atlantic, with coloured dots representing my geohashing expeditions mostly littering England and Ireland but with just one way out in Trinidad.
But there's a bigger geohashing-based achievement that I pulled-off this weekend. Upgrading the website.
When geohashing was invented as part of xckd comic 426, Randall Munroe and davean launched a MediaWiki-powered website for the sport, in a subdirectory on the server than ran the webcomics' phpBB-powered forums. All was well for a decade, but then hackers exploited a bug in the forum and stole the data in half a million accounts. The geohashing wiki itself wasn't targetted, but it became a secondary casualty when the entire server was taken offline by its owners. The wiki disappeared and... didn't come back.
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503 Service Unavailable page advising that the XKCD Forums are offline until they can be confirmed to be secure.
After they'd been down for a few months I realised they were probably never coming back, so I reached-out to Randall and davean and asked if could do it (and, if so, if I could get a copy of the data). Once I'd gotten Randall's consent and blessing - plus an enormous data dump! - I relaunched the site... and I've been running it ever since.
But... I've probably never been the best custodian. When I took it over it was running MediaWiki 1.31 LTS (MediaWiki 1.34 had been released, and the next LTS release, 1.35, was only a few months away). I kept the current version for compatibility, and I patched-out the serious security problems that turned up, but apart from that... I didn't really do any significant maintenance on it.
For almost seven years.
Until this weekend, when I learned that upgrading MediaWiki from version 1.31 to version 1.43 (the most-recent LTS version, from 2004) is a real drag. 1.31 requires PHP 7. 1.43 requires PHP 8. Therefore, there exists no version of PHP under which both versions will fully function.
The story of me stepping up through the releases, a few minor releases at a time, is pretty boring: I'll spare you the grisly details. But it's done now, and I aim not to neglect the site for seven years this time around.
If you're not already geohashing, the best time to start... was 18ยฝ years ago. But the next best time is right now. There's a few hundred (and growing!) of us routinely going out and exploring the world, and there's a friendly community of people you can chat to about what you find.
Footnotes
1 Of course, creating an account is not necessary to go geohashing: it's about the adventure, not the logging, after all! For example, I took two people with me on a short expedition in 2014 and recorded that both of them made it to the destination, but neither of them have accounts. So the number of low-single-digit expedition participants is probably even higher than I've suggested.
2 If you're a long-time reader and that last name sounds familiar, it's probably because Fippe sent me a postcard in 2020, which ultimately led to me soliciting postcards from all kinds of Internet strangers!
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