There’s just a little bit of information next to a member’s name that shows something about the frequency setting they are using (plain text/html, sees own message/ignores own messages). That was on the list, so it’s good to get knocked off. In the meantime we’ve tweaked a ton of admin pages to be a lot more efficient.
We’ve found a bug with incoming attachments. The guy that wrote the script is looking at that.
Now there is a little report for the closebunch, so you can see how many posts there are, when they were written and so forth. Important for people to be able to get a snapshot for the activity in their closebunch.
Fixed an odd little bug in the display of a random thumbnail for a closebunch. The stream of pictures created for images sent in (or, eventually, uploaded) was not being updated properly.
“The page for other members should show links to the posts they have written.”
We removed that from the page of next development tasks. Apparently little gremlins had snuck into the programming shop while we were sleeping (like we sleep anymore) and added that feature themselves. Nice job guys!
Or, we have gotten a little frenzied lately and haven’t even devoted the time we should to making sure that the development is following some sort of plan, crossing things off a list and tackling the milestones in the order that we originally laid them out. Whoops.
Some days we get a few nice things working on the site and it’s just a pleasure to be in the office. Other times we spend three hours chasing a bug that turns out to be a missing + and we wonder if perhaps we have bitten off more than we can chew. Or even carry to our table. We are past five hundred changes to the code in the repository. We were aiming to do a beta release before we reached a thousand, but that might be a little too hopeful.
In aviation there is the concept of the Minimum Equipment List. If there is even a single item on the MEL that isn’t working perfectly… the airplane doesn’t leave the ground. We need an MEL for our beat test. And perhaps another for when we show it to someone that might want to fund the next development phase (we’ve been calling that phase IDS: It Doesn’t Scale, the rallying cry of anti-Rails people on the web).
In the meantime we continue to read and re-read the Rails and Ruby books. How is this for a clever concept: In order to create RSS feeds without authentication just generate a unique URL for each user. They can even be de-activated on a per-user basis then. They could look like this:
http://closebunch.com/rss/woeijrsldnfslnv
They wouldn’t be linked from any public page, so there’s no way a search engine or ‘bot could stumble across them. Very clever.
Two weeks of programming and we have a feature that we couldn’t get working on tightcircle in four years: image attachments coming and going.
When you send images into your closebunch they are saved, then they are thumbnailed and the thumbnail is included in the outgoing message (if the person receiving the digest is allowing html to be sent). After quite a bit of work the images are displayed “inline,” that is right in the post they were sent in with.
There are a lot of things to tweak, but there is a good layer of abstraction so if or when we need to have the files on another server, we can do that.
We need to get to work on cleaning up the frequency settings, since those are critical for allowing attachments in and out. It is amazing to see, though.
Now attachments show up (in a rough manner) in the archive of messages. The display of the assets of a closebunch is a little better, but it still needs pagination and a better style sheet tweak. There are icons for all of the different file types currently accepted as attachments and we have a test script to run to check the handling of the attachments and their mime types.
Overall, it is approaching some level of robustness that would let us move on to the next feature.
Attachments appear to work, in some limited fashion. This was a huge stumbling block when we worked on tightcircle, so it was fun to get working on closebunch. When an attachment comes in it is stored in the storage area for the closebunch. If the attachment is an image, it goes into rotation and into the image gallery.
Now for a little real world testing…
We are inching along. We’re trying to get attachments working and the first step for that was writing an abstraction layer for the storage of assets (graphic and other files) on the system. Eventually we will probably use something like Amazon’s S3 where we can store the files somewhere else and serve them to the user’s web browser when we need to. (There are already libraries for Rails applications for using S3 and all sorts of clever tools for thumbnailing the images.)
For now, we had to figure out how to get an attachment out of the incoming mail and how to decide what to do with it, where to store it, how to return it (when necessary) to the browser.
Over the past couple days a lot of the work has been completed. Really nice, clean code that we hope is maintainable and scalable. Commented and well-thought out. And it works. We can send images into a closebunch and they get stored on the local file system and is available in a new “storage” page for the closebunch.
Eventually, these attachments will go out with the digests, will show up in the archives, if they are images they will go into rotation at the top of the pages. Hmm. They need some caption options.
Anyway, it is moving right along. Can’t complain at all about the last couple days.
It’s hard to split the time between debugging, cleaning up the existing features, and pressing ahead with new things.
We spent most of yesterday and today working on the handling of the text that comes in with the messages. AOL writes some particularly bad HTML and we needed to save the mangled messages. We will have to continue this battle (in part because AOL continues to evolve the horrible HTML they spit out into the Interwebs). For now we hope that it is a fat finger in the dyke.
Tomorrow we hope to get a first look at attachments. Whoo hoo!
Most of the morning was spent working on the admin pages so that we could more easily check on problems of recently-formed closebunches. There are a number of little bugs in the incoming message code, and I need to pull down the missives to debug that. I have a friend who loves debugging. I wish I did.
