Uh-oh. "Svelte" has taken over as the language with the most lines of code in FeoBlog.

It's funny. I started FeoBlog because I wanted the data structure to be the way that distributed social networks work. But in order to make using that appealing, you've got to have a nice UI. And it turns out there's a lot involved in working toward one of those. Who knew?

Twitter

So sounds like Twitter's getting bought in a hostile takeover.

I've been working on the next version of FeoBlog and I had a couple more features that I wanted to sneak in, but I should just release what I've got. (Agile! (lulz))

If you want to help me test it, or just want to play around with an open, distributed platform let me know!

I've been working on the next version of FeoBlog quite a bit lately. It's been fun!

One of the new features will be allowing FeoBlog to remember your private key for you, since working with them can be a bit cumbersome. I enjoyed this little experimental UI for letting users configure that behavior based on their preferred security level:

However, it ended up being a bit cumbersome to use in practice, so I'm going to change it to instead give you all the options, and then details about the security implications of the options you set. That way, it's less about shaming the user to choose the higher security level, and more about letting them configure it how they want and informing them of the consequences.

Another of the new features is Windows support! I switched to using ESBuild instead of Snowpack. Not only is it able to properly bundle, on Windows, I think it's actually faster as well. AND I found a plugin that lets me write my web worker as a module and inline it within the app bundle. 🎉 Definitely would recommend trying it if you're deploying JS to the browser.

Since about v0.5.0, I've been using FeoBlog as my own sort of RSS reader. I've got a few scripts that read Twitter, Mastodon, and some RSS feeds into FeoBlog for me, and then I just view my "My Feed" page and there's everything in one convenient place.

One surprising benefit of this is that I actually feel less of an urge to keep on top of things. The feed isn't going to get reordered by some unknown algorithm. There's no little "unread" counter telling me how many more I have to read until I'm "caught up". Plus, those posts aren't going to go away, I'll always be able to find them in the feed history. (Though it could be easier.)

So, generally a more healthy relationship with social media. Which is to say: I'm reading a bit less than before.

Bags or no bags?

I’m flying home to San Diego today. Trying to check in to my American Airlines flight, they’re telling me I can’t carry on my bag, and offering to charge me to check it.

But their web site says:

… sooo which is it? I guess I’ll check in at the counter and see. Hopefully the lines aren’t bad. 🤞

FeoBlog v0.6.0 Released

https://github.com/NfNitLoop/feoblog/releases/tag/v0.6.0

New Features

• Support for the Open Graph Protocol.
  Now when you share links to other web sites, (or Discord) they'll be able to generate previews if they support OGP.

  

• Quick access to share links.
  Click the arrow at the top-right corner of a post to access share links.

  

• db prune to remove data that's no longer being used.

  

• db usage to see who's hogging all your disk space.
  (See also: The tablestream crate I created to help with this output.)

  

Improvements

• #63 Faster Sync when syncing items between servers.
• #43 Better browser caching for static files.
• Logged-in profiles now have a color picker.
  You can set custom background colors for each identity you log in as to help keep them separate.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug (re)rendering widgets when changing pages.

TableStream

So, working on FeoBlog, I wanted to print some data into a table in a terminal, and I was picky about how I wanted to do so, so I wrote my own.

In particular, I wanted to be able to:

• Stream data without worrying about how much memory it'll use.
• Let the table formatter
  • Pick column sizes
  • truncate data
  • align data.
  • choose a table width based on the size of the data and/or the terminal window.

The existing ones I found on crates.io required holding the table in memory.

So I just wrote my own:

https://github.com/NfNitLoop/tablestream

Official Discord Server

There's now an official Discord server for FeoBlog. If you have questions, feedback, or just want to chat, drop on by!

https://discord.gg/MQKP4MbdF4

Note: Discord invite links can expire, so check this user's profile for the latest link if the above one doesn't work.

FeoBlog v0.5.0 Released

Released: July 18, 2021
https://github.com/NfNitLoop/feoblog/releases/tag/v0.5.0

New Features

• You can now filter and search your "My Feed" page.
  Is someone posting a bit too much today? You can temporarily hide them from your feed to see what everyone else has to say. Looking for a post you saw last week? Now you can search for a keyword and view only posts/comments that mention that.

  

Improvements

• Posts are no longer clickable.
  Previously, the entire block containing a post was clickable, and would take you to the page for that post. But that resulted in a lot of accidental clicks. Also, since the cursor changed to a pointer for the whole block, it was difficult to see if images were clickable. Now that behavior is gone. You can click on the timestamp of a post to go to a page for just that post.

• #52 Automatically redirect to the "My Feed" page when logged in.
  If you're logged in, you're probably repeatedly coming to FeoBlog to check your feed. So that's now the default view.

Bug Fixes

• #51 Draft timestamps could accidentally backdate posts.
• Fix for nav links that wouldn't highlight when they were clicked.

FeoBlog Changes

Whew. Have been working on some nice FeoBlog changes that I'll probably release this weekend.

• Better handling of post timestamps.
• Filtering and searching of your follow feed! (Which has become important now that my feed is basically 99% Twitter.)
• ... which is now the default view if you visit feoblog and are logged in.
• Oh yeah, and a fancy header to show you what posts/feed you're viewing, since that could sometime be ... unclear in the previous version.

I should probably make another video. The UI is looking much better now than the one I showed in v0.1. Plus, I've learned a couple things about video capture since then.

But for now, shower and bed. 😴