patrick.net

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

richwicks says

I have two suggestions:

1) I want the ability to tag a comment do I can refer back to it. Some things take days or weeks to research. I can bookmark them (and do), but it would be nice to have the ability to tag/untag a comment

2) It would be nice to have a list of responses to what I've written. I know this is sent in email, but I think it would be better to have a pull down on responses you need to take note of.

like favorites? or just searchable tags?

Searchable tags would be nice, but I think that's overkill. Say you can tag a comment with a name, and search based on that..

I'm thinking more like a website favorites.

Tenpoundbass says

Yes a searchable section dedicated to politicians, by office and party.

@Tenpoundbass OK, how about this:

https://patrick.net/post/1377838/2022-11-29-us-congressmen-lists

richwicks says

Searchable tags would be nice, but I think that's overkill. Say you can tag a comment with a name, and search based on that..

Well, every comment already has a unique id number, and you can find any comment by number like this:

https://patrick.net/comment?comment_id=1902282

Or did you mean a way to give multiple comments the same tag?

Patrick says

Tenpoundbass says

Yes a searchable section dedicated to politicians, by office and party.

Tenpoundbass OK, how about this:

https://patrick.net/post/1377838/2022-11-29-us-congressmen-lists

I think just having a checkmark to the left to tag a post as something you need to follow up on would be nice.

I imagine having a button to the LEFT of a post might be difficult to implement but something like that would be ideal.

Basically, bookmarks for the site is what I suggest.

@richwicks OK, something like the existing "pinned" list for threads:

https://patrick.net/pinned?a=Patrick

But for comments instead, right?

It wouldn't say why you pinned a comment, but hopefully you'd remember why.

Patrick says

richwicks OK, something like the existing "pinned" list for threads:

https://patrick.net/pinned?a=Patrick

But for comments instead, right?

It wouldn't say why you pinned a comment, but hopefully you'd remember why.

That would be good enough. I mean, I just need to know "I promised to respond to this" - but it takes more than 5 minutes for me to do it. One I have to do, is read a law in Pennsylvania that legalized mail in voting.

OK, it's kind of a good time for this, since I was planning to merge the database tables for original threads and comments so that search could be unified. Right now there are separate tables and it's a pain.

After they are unified, then there can be just one kind of search, and one kind of pinning.

Patrick says

OK, it's kind of a good time for this, since I was planning to merge the database tables for original threads and comments so that search could be unified. Right now there are separate tables and it's a pain.

After they are unified, then there can be just one kind of search, and one kind of pinning.

Can I make a suggestion?

Make a PARALLEL system to start with if you're about to do an overhaul. If the underlying database isn't changing, you can run two interfaces at the same time on top of the DB.

Also - BACKUP.

I do have a reasonable daily backup system I think. Worst case, one day is lost. Eventually I hope to have all comments immediately mirrored to a different server, but that's time, money, etc.

For the db migration, I plan to take every thread, make the text of it a comment, and have that thread just be a kind of skeleton which just has a bit of metadata and points to the original post content in the comments table.

So everything is going to be a comment. A "thread" will just be a wrapper around the first comment, which is the original post.

The whole site should look and work pretty much the same, except that search and pinning will be just one thing instead of two.

Patrick says

I do have a reasonable daily backup system I think. Worst case, one day is lost. Eventually I hope to have all comments immediately mirrored to a different server, but that's time, money, etc.

For the db migration, I plan to take every thread, make the text of it a comment, and have that thread just be a kind of skeleton which just has a bit of metadata and points to the original post content in the comments table.

So everything is going to be a comment. A "thread" will just be a wrapper around the first comment, which is the original post.

The whole site should look and work pretty much the same, except that search and pinning will be just one thing instead of two.

Again if you like (and you probably don't), I can help you clone this machine and you can run it locally for development. Setting up a website in your home is easy, but the name of the site will change, and you'll need to open ports on your router, and to setup let's encrypt. I can show you how to do all that.

Thanks, but I've got this, no problem.

Patrick says

Thanks, but I've got this, no problem.

Well, I can see you're using Let's Encrypt still and have the script running for it.

Setting up your router to allow 80 and 443 passthrough is all you need to do to test locally at home - and REALLY you don't need that OR Let's Encrypt unless you plan to allow access by the wider world.

All you need to do is clone the virtual machine. To do that, setup a VM that is CLOSE to what you have here, and then use sudo apt --installed to get a list of packages you need and/or are missing.

SMTP won't work though, that's a BITCH to setup on anything other than an "approved" server.

I reformatted thread lists (home page, author list, search results) to always have the user icon in the thread summary.

Also, the first image is much larger, and more of the text is included.

Noticed the HUGE IMAGES and I liked it better the other way. I have to scroll a lot more to read the next set of thread titles. Compact is better!

OK, I'll make them smaller.

@rocketjoe79

How about now?

Heck, I just removed images from post lists entirely, except for the author icons.

Cleaner, but then the site looks like mostly text.

Actually, all of those changes sucked.

Reverted everything, so site is back how it was.

Looks great again!

rocketjoe79 says

Looks great again!

make patnet great again!!!

didn’t want to miss an opportunity to say that

@patrick

I noticed if I make a comment, then click edit, then submit my edited text, I get a "no such comment" error. It does however save my updated comment ok.

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

make patnet great again!!!

When was it not great?

Hircus says

patrick

I noticed if I make a comment, then click edit, then submit my edited text, I get a "no such comment" error. It does however save my updated comment ok.

Thanks Hircus, definitely a recently introduced bug.

@Hircus should be fixed now.

Image tagging was broken for a while. Fixed now.

Onvacation says

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

make patnet great again!!!

When was it not great?

always great, but we just keep making it great

Left and right arrow keys now cause navigation to previous and next page of threads or comments.

Patrick says

Left and right arrow keys now cause navigation to previous and next page of threads or comments.

Now you tell me. I just got taken off a page I was typing when I used an arrow key to move the cursor.

Oh shit.

Thanks for telling me @HeadSet

So what I need to do is detect that the text box is not selected. Or maybe I should just drop this whole idea.

@HeadSet

OK, now I detect that the text box is not selected before using the l/r arrow keys to navigate.

Please let me know if it's still broken in some way.

Works perfectly!

You can now upload pdfs from your local computer. The result will be a link that says "view pdf" that people can click on to see it, like this:

view pdf

You can change that link text if you like to make it more descriptive of what you uploaded.

The same 10MB limit applies, as with images and videos.

I have a suggestion of a feature I actually saw on another site that I think might be good for Patnet and Patrick's sanity. I don't use Twitter, I use Nitter to read twitter posts. On thing I've noticed on Nitter is that YouTube links are redirected through: https://redirect.invidious.io/ which supposedly doesn't track you like YouTube would. I'm not an even intermediate in computer wizardry, so it's probably way more work than I imagine it is.

It's still a good site regardless. I keep coming back, right?

DhammaStep says

I don't use Twitter

I just signed up!

Twitter has a lot of "anti-vaxers" now.

Please follow me there, though I suspect my new account is already shadow banned because search auto-complete for patrick_dot_net does not work, even if you type "patrick_dot_ne" up to but missing the last "t".

https://twitter.com/patrick_dot_net?ref_src=patrick.net

Better way to embed videos and tweets

@charlie303 True, I don't do anything when someone posts a YouTube link except make it clickable. I don't trust Google, nor their subsidiary YouTube.

If I were to let them embed an html frame on patrick.net, then they would have vastly expanded powers to spy on what users are viewing. I don't think they allow plain video tags with YouTube as the source.

But for Rumble and some other sites I do trust, I transform a link into a video tag, because they allow that and because it doesn't give up much info about patrick.net users.

Patrick says

charlie303 True, I don't do anything when someone posts a YouTube link except make it clickable. I don't trust Google, nor their subsidiary YouTube.

If I were to let them embed an html frame on patrick.net, then they would have vastly expanded powers to spy on what users are viewing. I don't think they allow plain video tags with YouTube as the source.

But for Rumble and some other sites I do trust, I transform a link into a video tag, because they allow that and because it doesn't give up much info about patrick.net users.

Fair enough.

I try to type a description for YouTube videos but I just feel a clickable thumbnail is more eye catching.
I will learn more about the HTML commands iFrame and embed.

Thanks

I put "instant comments" back in, in a simplified way.

So if you have a thread open, and there is a new comment on it, you'll see the new comment without reloading the page.

I used to have a separate websocket server for this, but it was ugly and didn't work that well. Now I just have a poll going on in javascript, so each 10 seconds, the open page checks whether there were any new comments within the last 10 seconds, and if so appends them to the comments, just above the comment box.

Let me know if you see any bugs.

I added a red dot to the tab when there is a new comment, so if you have multiple threads open in multiple tabs, you can see when there are new comments in any of them.

The dot goes away on page reload, or when you make a comment, which is also a page reload.