closebunch development

v579

Colin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:14:32 +0000

There was a bug in the function that told the Post.writer what index number to use. If the administrator had deleted some intermediate messages the index numbers would try to fill in those deletions. Whoops. Now it is faster and more accurate.

v572

Colin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:15:21 +0000

The image streams we created for the submitted images (assets of a closebunch) were showing up as Flickr streams on a user’s account pages. We corrected that.

We finally have a handle on the RSS feeds. We can open a feed and cache the initial entries. We’ll need a way to periodically update all the feeds, but right now we need an interface for a user to add feeds to their account. We need to design a way for the entires to appear in the closebunch.

v566

Colin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:38:09 +0000

We spent the weekend looking at RSS modules and trying to figure out how to add RSS feeds to closebunches. That might go in this week. We also discovered a bug that was keeping people from logging in and fixed that.

We found a bug in the Timezone code, which was a good one to catch.

It is now impossible for a user who has admin powers to unsubscribe the creator or owner from a closebunch. They also cannot grant (or revoke) their own admin powers, or unsubscribe themselves (that will be done on a different page and it will be the same for all members).

The list that a member (or admin) sees of the members of a closebunch is a little better presented.

We have started to look at RSS feeds, but the toolkits available are… immature. We’re not sure what we’re going to do on that front.

v559

Colin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:00:04 +0000

When looking at a message caught in the filter it is now possible to invite that author to join the closebunch. It is also possible to delete the post or accept it into the archive of the closebunch.

Eventually we will need to be smarter about handling bounced messages, but for now this should be enough.

v558

Colin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:59:03 +0000

We tweaked the display of the notice and error messages at the tops of the page.

There is a difficult balance between spending time on the design and spending time on the inner workings that really make the service work. Ultimately, there will be a better design for the whole site, but we don’t want the beta site to be ugly.

Site design we like:

Jamy Ian Swiss

The Daily Beast

Wilson Miner

Some day the closebunch service will just be clicking along, working, and we’ll hire an inciredible designer and the site will be the sort of subdued flashy layout that we want. Until then it will stay pretty basic. (SoCal natives will note the reference to Ralph’s generic brand across the top.)

When a user is invited to a closebunch and they are not yet a user on the closebunch site an account is formed automatically. As is now common on the web it is necessary to protect against people signing people up without their consent (so we don’t get president@whitehouse.gov invited to a closebunch and start spamming the executive branch). That worked fine except there were two messages that went out, one about the invitation to the closebunch and one about the account on closebunch.

People who only really paid attention to their account note would activate their account, but they wouldn’t reply to the invitation to the closebunch. Now when a user activates their account it will automatically accept the invitation to a closebunch (as long as there is only one to accept).

Colin coding:

def [] record_id
(record_id.nil?) ? nil : self.find(:all,:conditions => {:id => record_id.to_i})[0]
end

I have no idea how bad that code is to write. Maybe there are Ruby on Rails people who are now cringing in their seats trying to think of how to politely tell me I’ve lost my bearings. For me, after a year of writing Ruby, it makes sense. I kept writing that code over and over, a couple lines to find a record in a table if I had an id to look for it. Now I can treat the model like a big array and just say

u = User[4]

That looks so much better than

id = params[:id]

u = User.find(:all,:conditions => {:id => id}) unless id.nil?

right? Right. But I have a feeling it is not the cool way to do things in Rails. Ah well, that will have to be someone else’s problem to clean up. Right now it makes things so much simpler to read.

v550

Colin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:16:46 +0000

Now we can trigger the acceptance of an invitation to a closebunch from the admin pages. Until we get the acceptance process streamlined that seems like a good idea. Of course, while we were working on that we bumped into a few other things on the admin pages.

v549

Colin — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 23:26:49 +0000

A lot of people have a standard signature line they use to close their email messages. Closebunch can now keep track of that signature line and use it to ignore both the signature line and anything below it. (There is a screen to set the signature line as part of a user’s account, but we probably need a way for a closebunch administrator to set it (unless it is already set).)

v547

Colin — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:29:53 +0000

Not a bad morning for a Monday. We already cleaned up some of the code in the models (missive and bunch) and knocked a feature off the list of “Next Development Tasks.”

We need to create an MEL, which in aviation is a Minimum Equipment List, for our soft launch (where we suggest other people use the service). Right now there’s a problem with the incoming mail, which is sort of our of our hands. When that’s addressed we’ll work up a list of the features we need to have rock solid before adding more than our current dozen brave users.

v544

Colin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:33:21 +0000

You can finally edit a frequency setting profile. That took forever. Amazing how when we spend a morning chasing a foolish bug it puts a damper on the rest of the day. Very frustrating to keep adding debugging and reporting code to a page, controller, and model until we discover that there’s just a basic misunderstanding of how the function call is used.

Ah well. Next item!

v541

Colin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:51:37 +0000

It is now possible for an administrator to switch a member back to the default frequency for when their digests are sent.

The list on the front page of the closebunches is now legible. There were some cascading style sheet issues that were beyond us, and we brought in David Shaw of Belm to fix them.

Onward.