Software Development

There are 86 posts filed in Software Development (this is page 2 of 9).

Who is using JSON-LD? CNN…

During the recent high news flow events for the US House speaker, CNN’s live-blog posts for a single day were a great capturing of the events as the happened. One thing that I noticed was that there did not seem to be a way to link to individual items in the blog. After doing a “view-source”, I saw this text:

What I saw appeared to be JSON-LD. I saw that there was a url item for each post. Here is a link to an item on Nancy Mace – the page comes up with that item at the top, and older items being displayed after it. Interesting…wonder who else is using technology.

Engaging and curation

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation – I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn’t it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren’t following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to “party” and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah – Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation – I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!

Notes on adding a feature to MyStatusTool

Looking at adding medium-editor to MyStatusTool, downloaded zip file from medium-editor repo.

Made a copy of my current setup

Updated config.json and app.js to use port 2030

Looked at this demo of use of textarea with medium-editor, will work on adding this to admin.js

Updated views\admin.js to add references to medium-editor CSS and JS files, and add other stuff to support.

Added medium-editor CSS and JS files to public\css and public\js folders

Was able to get the medium-editor working, but could not see the labels on the toolbar. After a fair amount of searching, found a set of options for button labels that made me go back to the demo page I was using for an example. Instead of “false” (the default value), the button labels option was “fontawesome”. I had issues with some other app in trying to correctly access FontAwesome fonts, so I decided to change that to “none”, and then I was able to see the labels – awesome!

I then was able to add links in some text, and that worked correctly in the displayed text and the RSS feed. I did notice that there were paragraph marks in the RSS feed description. I had seen some mention of medium-editor adding paragraph tags, so I added some logic to app.js to strip the tags before creating the feed (I was already doing this for the post itself).

I then tried all of the buttons on the toolbar, and they had the desired effect – nice!

During this effort, I briefly looked at some other options (TinyMCE, Quill), but found there were restrictions or payment requirements, so I am glad I was able to get the medium-editor working. I will be adding these changes to the repo and doing a little more testing before rolling out to my beta testers (let me know if you would like to be a beta tester for MyStatusTool!)…

Emissary install problems

I have been in touch with Ben Pate about his Emissary app, and tried to install it on my Windows 10 laptop, but had some problems. I decided to copy my debug log to a blog post and send the link to Ben for further review.

Downloaded Go (https://go.dev/dl/) (https://go.dev/dl/go1.19.5.windows-amd64.msi) and did install.

Downloaded MongoDB Community Server (https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/community) and did install.

Started Emissary, got the following error message:

go: downloading github.com/jmespath/go-jmespath v0.4.0

# github.com/chai2010/webp

cgo: C compiler “gcc” not found: exec: “gcc”: executable file not found in %PATH%

# github.com/pjbgf/sha1cd/cgo

cgo: C compiler “gcc” not found: exec: “gcc”: executable file not found in %PATH%

PS C:\Users\sylve\Documents\emissary-main\emissary-main>

Installed gcc++ from Cygwin, got this set of error messages:

# command-line-arguments

C:\Program Files\Go\pkg\tool\windows_amd64\link.exe: running gcc failed: exit status 1

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-cygwin/11/../../../../x86_64-pc-cygwin/bin/ld: cannot find -lmingwex: No such file or directory

/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-cygwin/11/../../../../x86_64-pc-cygwin/bin/ld: cannot find -lmingw32: No such file or directory

collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

Added C:\cygwin64\lib\w32api to PATH (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4272139/gcc-cygwin-compile-error), got the same error.

Downloaded https://winlibs.com/ GCC 12.2.0 Win32 and Win64 downloads, unzipped the Win32 download. Copied mingw32 folder to C: drive, then updated PATH environment variable to add C:\mingw32\bin

Tried server install again, got same error messages (cannot find -mingwex, -lmingw32)

Deleted Cygwin entries from PATH environment variable, leaving just the mingw32 path

Tried server install again, got a new set of error messages:

PS C:\Users\sylve\Documents\emissary-main\emissary-main> go run server.go –setup

# github.com/pjbgf/sha1cd/cgo

cc1.exe: sorry, unimplemented: 64-bit mode not compiled in

# github.com/chai2010/webp

cc1.exe: sorry, unimplemented: 64-bit mode not compiled in

PS C:\Users\sylve\Documents\emissary-main\emissary-main>

A roadmap for MyStatusTool

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was working on a blog tool not ready to show off yet. Since then, I thought I should follow Colin Walker’s lead in describing some of what I am developing. The working title is MyStatusTool, you can think of it as “Twitter using rssCloud”. The minimum functionality I am working toward is to have a text box to enter a short post, to create a RSS feed based on the posts, for each post to have a page, to ping a rssCloud server when a post is live, to have the posts be displayed in reverse-chronological order, and to display posts from other tools that create RSS feeds supporting rssCloud. This pretty much describes the “Read user feeds…” functionality in FeedLand (link works if you have a FeedLand account). You can also think of the Twitter web user interface as an example. I will probably create a temp Github repo soon to start putting the app under version control. Stay tuned for more updates!