Developer Diary, New Year's Day
John ColagioiaLike I assumed last week that I didn’t need to explain Christmas to anyone, this week, I assume that nobody needs me to tell them about New Year’s Day, celebrated today wherever people use the Gregorian calendar. I suppose that other calendars also celebrate New Year’s Day today, but their today doesn’t fall on today, and…no, that route through the conversation quickly grows too confusing…
Let’s kick off the new year with some projects.
Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter
As a reminder for those of you interested in such things, I’ll have the next issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter ready to go on Saturday the sixth.
If you have signed up on Mailchimp, I still don’t quite trust the company, then you’ll get the e-mail on Saturday. If you have subscribed on Buy Me a Coffee—at the link in the previous paragraph, click the Follow button to the upper-right of the page; no money will change hands—you’ll get it on Tuesday morning, the ninth of January, because I never publish blog posts on Tuesdays, making that a nicer match than Saturdays.
What will you find inside? As always, you’ll find links to all the articles that I found interesting in my RSS feed or bookmarked, plus some analysis of blog traffic. For December, I’ve written a short piece on one of my silliest (avoided) brushes with celebrity, discussed media consumption, and provided some early stage looks at two upcoming projects. If you’ve become a member on Buy Me a Coffee, then you can already see previews for some of that.
Notoboto
This week, the Markdown syntax highlighting seems to at least approach completion, with a fixed-width font now in use for rendering “code” segments, inline or as blocks.
We also have the beginnings of a context menu that can handle copying and pasting text, while also understanding whether the user can copy or paste text. Sorry, re-reading that, I can see that it might not make sense for everyone. I mean that the menu code checks to see if the user has anything selected before allowing them to copy text—because you can’t copy empty text—and checks that the system clipboard has text in it before trying to paste.
You will also note that I finally corrected my erroneous assertion that Microsoft had some responsibility for CoffeeScript. They don’t; they push TypeScript—which I sometimes get paid to use, so how did I mess that up?—and CoffeeScript comes from an independent developer.
Following the success of adding it to the blog, last month, the archive of my tweets now uses unrot∙link to redirect you to the Internet Archive, for pages that no longer exist. In some ways, using the service here felt more important than doing so on the blog. Here, I can always edit a post, if someone finds an occasional bad link. But I posted links to Twitter for so many years, and when I look through the archive, I often get Not-Found (404) errors, so this should make the archive far more useful for anybody who wanders through it.
On the downside, unlike updating the blog, I didn’t have a convenient common header file to edit, which would magically propagate the client code to all tweets. Instead, I needed to edit every single page in the archive, to add a reference to the client script. But no, at least I didn’t do it manually…
find . -type f -name "*.html" -exec sed -i '/<\/head>/i <script async defer src="/twitter/assets/redirect.js"></script>' {} \;
The above command—on POSIX-compliant systems, such as your average desktop Linux distribution—looks for every file (-type f) with a dot-HTML extension. And, for each match, it modifies the file in-place (-i) by inserting the reference—note the i starting off the replacement text—to the script before the closing head tag.
If I expected to edit these files, I might have added a carriage return in there. But honestly, since tweetback generated all the files, and I have no interest in manipulating them without a solid reason, this insertion works fine.
Next
This week, I expect to continue on with Notoboto, since the editor has advanced so far. And I suppose, at some point, I may add unrot∙link to my Pebble archive; it has far fewer URLs to care about, and most of them point straight to this blog, though, so maybe not.
I also have other projects that I should return to, though, so who really knows?
Credits: The header image is ¡2013! by Eneas De Troya, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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Tags: programming project devjournal