zalasur

zalasur, 12 days ago

@andrewdessler Still mad at myself that I keep typing "google" when referring to the number.

zalasur, 12 days ago

@mcc Ministry is one of those bands where if you start with a random album it will be a solid choice no matter what.

My personal favorite is Filth Pig.

zalasur, 12 days ago

@mudboot I remember those days. Having clothing options that were appropriate for each post of the day, allowing for weather changes, was always a challenge.

zalasur, 12 days ago

@mudboot "I don't think I need a jacket today" always led to problems later that day. Every time.

zalasur, 12 days ago

But another aspect to the problem is that a lot of people who answer technical questions seem to have this habit of missing the point.

Instead if answering a question straight, they try to guess at the questioner's true intent and answer the question they think is being asked.

Or they berate them for asking and wasting everyone's time.

Or they just flat out answer incorrectly. And that one gets upvoted for some reason.

It's been a creeping problem for years.

zalasur, 12 days ago

So the news about LLM integration is just the final layer of icing of the shit cake that SO has turned into in recent years. Basically it will accelerate what has been an ongoing entropy issue with the site.

zalasur, 12 days ago

@infobeautiful "That's amazing, I have the same combination on my luggage!" - Mel Brooks as President Scroob

zalasur, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

@AlarminglyBad "Frodo! You've turned invisible!"

"Ok Gandalf you really need to lay off that pipe."

"...Pipe?"

zalasur, 13 days ago

@dathagerty Ok, fair point.

zalasur, 13 days ago

@Chocobozzz And just to clarify because I just realize my original post might be a bit vague in this context: I am referring to federated posts to non-peertube instances. It's been a while since I checked, but I can see my live stream if I go to another peertube instance that follows mine.

zalasur, 13 days ago

@Chocobozzz Ah, that does make sense.

Thanks for looking into this. I wasn't even expecting any sort of response to my venting yesterday. It's very much appreciated.

zalasur, 13 days ago

So the initial CMS setup in Keystone was successful on my local, and I created a new branch in my github repo with the changes. I removed the Fractal-related models and will instead add more generic images in my schema.

I'll be adding a "Page" to my schema as well to make it straightforward to create non-blog content on my page, too. I haven't decided on the final name yet.

Now, I gotta figure out what to do the frontend. I'll be using Lit as the framework and axios to make the requests.

zalasur, 13 days ago

I'm going to try to avoid the common problem of "dependency hell" that plagues a lot of JS projects. The idea will be the front end will be very bare-bones. Nothing fancy; just the basics to have a functional website:

1. Implement all features in HTML if at all possible
2. If HTML won't work, do it in CSS instead
3. And finally, barring that, I'll use JavaScript as the final fallback.

Lit is just the right balance of keeping it simple while providing useful functionality.

zalasur, 13 days ago

I'm going to try to avoid the common problem of "dependency hell" that plagues a lot of JS projects. The idea will be the front end will be very bare-bones. Nothing fancy; just the basics to have a functional website:

1. Implement all features in HTML if at all possible
2. If HTML won't work, do it in CSS instead
3. And finally, barring that, I'll use JavaScript as the final fallback.

Lit is just the right balance of keeping it simple while providing useful functionality.

zalasur, 13 days ago

I'm going to try to avoid the common problem of "dependency hell" that plagues a lot of JS projects. The idea will be the front end will be very bare-bones. Nothing fancy; just the basics to have a functional website:

1. Implement all features in HTML if at all possible
2. If HTML won't work, do it in CSS instead
3. And finally, barring that, I'll use JavaScript as the final fallback.

Lit is just the right balance of keeping it simple while providing useful functionality.

zalasur, 13 days ago

I'm now looking at data stores for use on the front end. Data stores are useful for catching data seamlessly to keep a web site from repeatedly requesting the same data needlessly. Even better, you don't have to worry about hydration or pre-caching. Each component thinks it's just rendering simple data while the data store does the heavy lifting with regards to returning and storing the data. It's a really nice abstraction layer and I use that design pattern in my projects where ever possible.

zalasur, 13 days ago

Lit has a sort of built-in "context" mechanism, which can be used to make a data store available to your web app. The data store is separate from the context, but the two go hand-in-hand.

So, I just have to look around and find a good data store library that works well with Lit. once I have that, that pretty much completes my technology stack for the front end.

I plan on using KeystoneJS for the backend CMS, but that's not the only "backend" I intend to create.

zalasur, 13 days ago

Once I get my blog going again, I'll go to the next step. I'll use the same front end but I have a project in mind that I'll be developing under Python. The nice thing about the architecture I'm developing is that it does not matter what programming language I use for the various parts of my stack. I could write it in Rust, Java, C, COBOL, whatever. As long as everything talks the same "language" (GraphQL) when everything just operates seamlessly.

That's the goal, at any rate. 😏

zalasur, 13 days ago

There is one little wildcard I need to think about: ActivityPub. I was disappointed that Ghost didn't work out. Even if I had gotten it to work, looking it over I did see some serious limitations with that CMS. As much as I was critical of KeystoneJS as a platform, Ghost was just simply less attractive. It didn't have the flexibility that Keystone had and did not have native support for GraphQL.

So I have to research that a bit. Would it be hard to implement a plug-in for that? I don't know yet

zalasur, 13 days ago

And maybe someone is already working on it. There's that possibility as well. I can't be the only one using Keystone who's wondered if ActivityPub would be a good addition to the CMS.

But those are far-off solutions. For now, let's get the website working and we'll sweat the big stuff later.

zalasur, 13 days ago

Ah ha, so I think I found it. MobX. I've used it with React. In fact, it's what is being used by my current website. MobX has the benefit of not being opinionated and since I already have experience with it, I already have a head start on the learning curve.

I just need to figure out the integration piece with Lit.

Ok, so I think I'm set on the tech stack for my new web site.

Ironically the only major change after all that talk about refactoring was switching from React to Lit. 😅

zalasur, 13 days ago

@schratze I worked on a Point Of Sale software system for a big box retail chain (my first software gig writing PHP code interestingly enough) and yes we heard all the jokes. And we made plenty of them ourselves. 😂