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Early Version of This Blog
I was looking for something in GitHub the other day when I found the repository for the first iteration of this blog. I was curious as to how it looked and I’d thought that I’d boot it up and post a few screenshots of it.1 It started life as a Hugo site. There a two reasons for that, with the first being that I didn’t have the patients to style a website from scratch, and Hugo came with some pretty nice templates. Continue reading →
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Lava Stream
Another random hack today, but this one sort of developed over the week. It all started last Monday. I was doing an exploratory task around single-sign on. I read Scripting News that morning, and I was thinking about the style of writing Dave Winer has adopted for his blog: short notes made across the day, sort of like a running commentary on what he’s working on and what his thinking. I wondered if this would work for my job: having a way to write your thoughts down, even if they’re rough, so you can build atop them. Continue reading →
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A Lisp-based Evans Wrapper
I wanted an excuse to try out this Lisp-like embedded language Go library that was featured in Golang Weekly. Found one today when I was using Evans to test a gRPC endpoint and I wanted a way to automate it. Hacked up something in 30 minutes which takes a method name and a Lisp structure, converts it to JSON and uses Evans to send it as a gRPC message. As the afternoon progressed, I added some facilities to send HTTP GET and POST methods with JSON request bodies, plus some facilities to set some global options. Continue reading →
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I got a little bored today so I added task progress indicators to this Obsidian roadmap thing I built for work.
What the task progress indicators look like. When a task is created, but is not yet scheduled, it appears as an outlined rectangle. It turns into a grey rectangle when it’s added to the sprint. It then changes colour as the task progresses through the software lifecycle; turning purple while it’s being developed, blue while it’s being tested, and finally green when it’s ready for release.
They’re implemented as embedded SVG images, added directly to the note much like the span element used for status labels.
Move the insertion point over the the SVG image to edit the markup. It’s nice being able to add embellishments like this. Obsidian treating notes as regular files on the file-system is a huge advantage for these sorts of automations. No need to learn how to make a plugin; just write a shell script1 that’ll output Markdown, schedule it to run a couple of times a day, and you’re good to go.
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Mahjong Score Card Device
I’ve recently started playing Mahjong with my family. We’ve learnt how to play a couple of years ago and grown to like it a great deal. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with how the game is scored, and while it’s not complicated, there’s a lot of looking things up which can make scoring a little tedious. So my dad put together a Mahjong scoring tool in Excel. You enter what each player got at the end of a round — 2 exposed pungs of twos, 1 hidden kong of eights, and a pair of dragons, for example — and it will determine the scores of the round and add them to the running totals. Continue reading →
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Shutting Down Blogging CMS
Ditching the CMS I was using for this blog is actually quite liberating. It means I don't have to spend any time trying to bridge the feature gap for what I need for a basic blogging CMS, and could focus on other projects. For example, I spent this evening working on "awstools": mainly coming up with a new name for it. I really can't use "awstools" as AWS is a trademark. Continue reading →
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The Podcast Favourites App
In today’s issue of “useless apps that nobody but me would want to use”, I’ve managed to get a version of the Podcast Favourites app built and deployed. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it works quite well. Here are some screenshots of it, starting with the main screen you see when you log in: As you can probably guess, I listen to a lot of ATP. Continue reading →
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An idea for that micro-bulk-image tool: instead of prioritising uploads, maybe prioritise processing of already uploaded images. Things like cropping, optimising, etc. after the upload, and then re-uploading it.
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Hmm, I’m wondering if Broadtail needs a mode for downloading the audio of a video only, and uploading it to a podcasting service like Pocketcasts. I did this twice before, and now wish I can do it again. Third time is when a pattern is emerging.
Also, a bit of a deviation to finish the current work outstanding for Feed Journaler. Much of it is trying to get the Markdown translator working with Write.as post, mainly to deal with posts without titles, and to strip any hashtags that appear in the first and last paragraph. The code is a real mess. I should probably spend some time cleaning it all up.
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A snapshot of the indie-web style project mentioned yesterday:
This is just static HTML and JavaScript at the moment. The idea is that each of these “cards” can be rearranged by direct manipulation. So I spent most of this morning trying to get drag and drop working in JavaScript.
After hooking up
dragenteranddragleaveevent listeners to the Stimulus controllers bound to each of the cards, I found that the controllers were getting enter and leave events continuously as the dragged element was moved over them. These enter and leave events occurred almost immediately, making it difficult to indicate a drop-zone just by reacting to the events themselves. Setting a class on enter and then removing that class immediately on leave meant that the class was never shown.Turns out this is because the events were being sent for all the subelements of the card. Moving the dragged element from the card padding to the text field resulted in an enter event for text field, followed immediately by a leave event on the card element.
This means that in order to do any form of indication, some element tracking is required. I’m currently using a counter to do that, which will increment by one when a
dragenterevent is received and decrement by 1 ondragleave. It sort of works — I’ve got to fix it when the drop event occurs — but I get super concerned about the counter getting out of sync and the indicator being stuck “on” when the dragged element is completely outside it.One other thing I could try is having some form of set tracking each of the entered and exited elements and using the set length to determine whether to show the indicator. I trust that the browser will guarantee that a
dragleavewill always follow adragenterevent sent to the element. 🤔 -
Revising the micro-bulk-uploader project. I’ve been reading a lot about IndieAuth and Micropub formats and I got really excited about it. I figured this would be a good project to try them.
In short, this is a bulk image uploader. It’s primarily tailored for Micro.blog, but since these formats are standards in a way, there’s no real reason why it couldn’t work for other services.
Basically, the idea is this:
- User authenticates with their website.
- They are presented with a set of file uploads, which they can used to prep their images. They can reorder their images (ideally using drag-and-drop) and write some alt text.
- Once they’re happy with the images, they click “Upload”.
- The server will upload the images and then generate the HTML to produce a gallery (or just a list of images if they so prefer).
I have a few goals for this project:
- To ship a hosted service for others to use. The goal is to get into the practice of shipping software for other people. This is the principal goal: it must be usable by others. Otherwise, there’s no point doing this.
- To get a working version out the door in two weeks for others to start trying. Two weeks is April 1st, which should be achievable.
- To learn about the Indypub formats, specifically IndieAuth and Micropub.
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I think it’s time to close the “Untitled Summer Project”, the service I was working on to upload files to S3 for publishing on Drummer.
The goal — despite not being entirely public — was to have a service that could be used by others to upload images to S3 for the purpose of publishing them to their blog, particularly blogs published using Drummer and served through Old School. I was hoping to have something that I could share with others by the end of Summer.
Well, now it’s Autumn, and I’ve made very little progress on it since early February. So it’s time to cut my losses and shut it down.
I think there were a number of factors that resulted in the failure of this project:
- I wasn’t using it enough to get excited about it. I mean, I was using to manage my uploaded pictures for workingset.net, but I was only doing so occasionally.
- Apart from not using it, I wasn’t getting much out of the project itself. There wasn’t anything exciting about the project from a purely coding standpoint (apart from doing image resizing in the browser using WASM, which might come in handy for some other projects), and if I was getting nothing from using the project myself, there was no other intrinsic motivation to continue working on it.
- I was planning to move on from Drummer and Old School as a blogging platform. I figured giving write.as a try, which also has image hosting, so there was no real need for it anymore.
I think what I need to do for any project that I hope to share with others, I need to share it with others much earlier than when I was originally planning to. I think that feedback from others using it is important for driving the project forward, particularly if I am not getting that drive from using it myself.
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A Tool That (Almost) Solved My Step Function Woes
I reached the end of my tether at work today on the task I was working on. The nature of the task involved crafting an AWS Step Function with several steps. Each step on the critical path contained some error handling, and several of them contained some cleanup logic, that had to be called by a bunch of other steps. This cleanup sequence is relatively complicated, and I’ve raised a number of PR’s to my colleagues which have come back with requests for change. Continue reading →
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Trying my hand at logo design for something I’m working on. I’m aiming for something that looks like a mix between a bookmark, the letter D, and something to suggest synchronising stuff. This is probably the best I’ve got so far.
