Patchwork Dev Diary # 2

Here is the dev diary for my April 2018 grant #ssbc-grants

Patchwork Development April/May 2018

My previous dev diary can be found here: %DxQpzCl...

2018-04-13

I spent a lot of today working on adding full secret blob support to patchwork private messages.

Originally this stuff was just hacked in but I decided to try keep some consistency and made a PR to update ssb-ref to be able to handle secret blobs. I also added a parseBlob method that gives you the id and the key. This also needed a PR on ssb-mentions as it didn't know how to handle the key field.

So from the next release, all blobs added to private messages will actually be encrypted (right now, the message is encrypted, but the blobs themselves can be read if someone browses their blobs folder).

Also (inspired by this issue), I spent some time experimenting with embedding audio and video directly into the markdown posts. Experimental support is on the latest master and will probably be in the next version!

The screenshot above is a twofa' -- that is, it's encrypted and embedded audio/video in a private message thread.

The embedding is super basic right now, but it's a great start I think! It depends on getting a PR to ssb-markdown accepted.

@matt oh this is great! I've wanted embeds for ages, oh yeah, I think we do need someway to flag the content-type.
Oh I see you are discussing that in the PR to ssb-markdown

2018-04-14

Spent a bit of time going through a bunch of issues and tagging/replying. The issue in sbot has now been fixed, so I've gone ahead and bumped patchwork to use the latest scuttlebot version (no longer running on an old weird fork)!

Updated the ssb-markdown audio/video embed PR to use a slightly different approach. Now detecting an audio: or video: at the start of the alt text to decide what sort of embed to use. I'm just waiting on aproval from @mix and @dominic before merging!

Decided to try integrating ssb-search into patchwork. Discovered a bug in flumeview-search that causes it to hang when terms include a word with less than 3 characters and filed a PR to fix! Hopefully this merged soon.

And now patchwork search is much faster and has some kind of ranking functionality (rather than just listing most recent). Will see how this goes over the next little bit. We might need to tweak things a bit.

Excellent work @Matt McKegg!

I can probably push out a new release tomorrow. Besides the stuff in my dev diary above, there's also support for viewing ticktack blog posts and some bug fixes!

Just waiting on confirmation from @mix and @Dominic that they are happy with the latest changes to the embedded media PR before releasing to the public. Once there are posts using it, we're stuck with it forever!!!!

Once that new release is out, you'll all be able to go to my secret announcement and see the secret-image I embedded there. Can you guess what it is?

Didn't quite get this out yesterday as planned. And I'm busy for the next couple of days, but hopefully I'll push it out on Thursday.

Experiencing a couple of small perf glitches that might be related to the electron upgrade.

Trying to get https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-ref/pull/15 and https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-mentions/pull/11 finalised before pushing the new patchwork release out (handling of mentions for private blobs).

Me and @Dominic are currently discussing an alternative.

2018-04-20

@Dominic raised some good points on the mentions PR I did a few days ago about allowing query strings on all ssb link references. This could allow linking to a private message by including an unbox key. I revised my ssb-mentions and ssb-ref PRs to both work this way instead.

I also finished working on private blobs and embeds in patchcore and published ssb-markdown@3.6.0 and patchcore@1.26.0.

Made a few fun tweaks to patchwork including

• add ability to search backlinks by prepending an ID with ? in the search box and also added "Find Link References" to all hyperlink context menus.
• fixed an issue where you couldn't copy links to messages with IDs that started with numbers
• can now open blobs by pasting their ID in the search box
• gatherings page now shows all events that any of the people you follow are attending, and highlights this with the bump message (also correctly shows bump message for attending on public feed)

Gonna try and get a (pre-release) patchwork release out tonight!

Okay I just pushed out Patchwork v3.9.0.

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork/releases/tag/v3.9.0

Please try it out and report an issues you find! Lots of fun little tweaks in this release. Looking forward to getting stuck into some harder problems in the next few weeks