Aaron Parecki

I consider my Slack/IRC gateway the best one out there, at least in terms of looking the most native to IRC users. We use this to connect the #indieweb IRC channel with our Slack team, so people can join the same rooms from either Slack or IRC. Often times people don't even realize that other users in IRC are actually connected via the Slack bridge! However, one glaring missing feature was that image uploads from Slack did not come through right. Today, I fixed that!

Today I am continuing my work on building out the client test suite for Micropub.rocks.

This morning, Marty mentioned that he was having trouble with Quill because of my previous change where I updated the default scope to "create" instead of "post". (I documented this change as part of Day 51, but I suppose it could have been its own 100days project itself!) 

Today I added a section to Micropub.rocks that shows the raw request that was received from the client. This way it is very obvious what your client sends, which should help while developing your client.

Thanks to @sebsel for pointing this out! 

I realized that most of the time I'm not posting photos in Quill, so having the photo fields in the note interface so prominent isn't necessary, and adds clutter. So now, a camera icon takes the place of the form fields, and when you click it, it expands to the fields that were there before. This makes the note interface slightly cleaner.

Today I implemented the first client test for Micropub.rocks. This means Micropub.rocks acts as a Micropub server, expecting certain parameters from the client. The first test is a simple test of creating an h-entry with text content. The test describes what it expects, and when the client makes the Micropub POST request, the post is rendered in realtime.

I'm pretty pleased with this little bit of UI I just added to micropub.rocks. 

Today I implemented the authorization server for Micropub.rocks. This means it's now possible to sign in to Micropub.rocks from a Micropub client such as Quill.

Continuing the work on the micropub.rocks client tests, today I worked on the OAuth server so that you can sign in to Micropub clients to post to the test account. Aside from providing the actual sign-in functionality, I also want this to provide helpful error messages and walk you through setting the parameters to build the authorization request.

Micropub.rocks is the test suite and debugging tool for the Micropub spec. Currently it only has tools for testing your Micropub servers. Today I began the process of adding tools for testing your Micropub clients.

For some reason, some of the time I've noticed that my "load more" links load completely the wrong content. These links previously would load the next page inline, and render the new content without a page load. I liked this as a compromise between traditional full pageload paging and infinite scroll. However, I've been seeing it behave strangely the last week or two, sometimes loading duplicate content, or the page scrolling strange after clicking it. 

When someone types an emoji in Slack, it shows up in the API as a text description surrounded by colons. For example, 😻 is :heart_eyes_cat: when it comes through the API. Previously, the gateway would just send the text through to IRC, which doesn't look great for IRC users.

For quite some time, we've been running my IRC/Slack gateway so that our main #indieweb IRC channel is also available in Slack. It's great because it allows people to use the nice mobile-friendly Slack client, while also not locking ourselves into a proprietary platform. The bridge is also used to allow people to join the chat from our web interface.

First of all, if you aren't subscribed to the IndieWeb newsletter, you definitely should! (available via email, RSS and h-feed).

After posting this many blog posts with Quill's HTML editor, I've been somewhat annoyed at some of the strange HTML artifacts it creates. Specifically it adds a few helper classes to the HTML for some of the visual editor parts, and some unnecessary classes are added to some of the images. Today I cleaned up the HTML that Quill sends so that it now only sends very plain and simple HTML. To do this, I send the output from the Javascript editor through the HTMLPurifier library, removing all class attributes and allowing only a specific subset of HTML tags.This ends up being only barely visible, but is a good change under the hood. The one visible change this will have for my blog posts is that now they won't sometimes have an extra empty line at the bottom. This was caused by me pressing "enter" after writing the last paragraph, creating an empty placeholder paragraph in the visual editor.

Today I added support to IndieNews for storing and displaying the timezone of submitted posts. Previously, all the dates were stored and displayed as UTC, which can be misleading such as when a post is submitted after 5pm in Pacific time since the post then has the date of the following day in UTC.

I should have known this one would take longer than I expected.My Jawbone UP finally died, so I replaced it with a FitBit. I've really enjoyed the Jawbones, but I'm not confident in the future of the company's wearables department. I decided to take the plunge and dive in to the FitBit ecosystem instead. I got a new FitBit Charge 2, which among other things includes a heart rate monitor which I'm excited about. But step one was rewriting my sleep import script to pull sleep data from FitBit instead of Jawbone.

Following up on yesterday's update of adding a Webmention form on IndieNews' Webmention endpoint, today I finished building out the UI for submitting to IndieNews from a browser.Now the "Submit" link includes a form where you can paste in your post's URL, in case your website doesn't send Webmentions automatically.

I realized today that if you visited the Webmention endpoint for IndieNews in a browser, it showed a 404 page, since the Webmention endpoint was only registered for POST requests. Today I added a page that is served for a GET request.