Garage bulletin board

People in Discord telling me I need to stop and savour the cool thing I made and All I Can Think is that I need to get working on 2.0 today, since there are so many stupid things I didn't know or think to consider and I have to fix it now before someone else beats me to it.

 

If someone who knows JS looks at the thing they can add all the functionality people are asking for in five minutes, where it'll take me at least an hour to figure out which argument to use. I'm honestly not even confident that if I'd written the thing in python, people wouldn't be able to fix it faster than I could if I didn't run errands today and just sat writing code all day.

 

I can never rest while there's still things to improve.

 

that is a fucking mood and it is a frustrating mood.

 

2.0 actually came together with only a couple of egregious moments of I May Be Stupid along the way. Currently trying to decide if wrapping up multiple versions of the script as extensions is more work than making an interface that controls the three bits of code that need to be controlled for.

On the one hand, the code is already there, all I gotta do it zip it up as xpi -- but on the other hand my literal fucking job used to be coding interfaces so I do have the skills for the front-end work.

I kinda just don't wanna do it without being paid.

 

Sincerely, fuck JavaScript

 

.... my friends are geniuses. One of them pointed out to me that since I'm already providing a prewritten comment, why not provide a prewritten comment script instead.

 

Y'know???? So people can edit it and don't have to figure out what they want to say? So they can focuse on how to say what they want to say?

Like, of course, it'll be obvious that a lot of these comments come from a script, but... if we're talking tools to get people who don't comment, and have never commented, and who have big white paper anxiety... it's another adjustment step, basically. First, someone else writes your comment, then you write it with someone else helping you figure out what to say, and then you start figuring out what you want to say by yourself.

 

I get that no amount of tools can get people to comment if they don't want to. I get that. But the more I talk about this, the more I think about what the practical brain-level barriers actually are, the more I wanna do something about it.

 

I will literally go through the effort of learning extension development if I can get other people working on this with me, I will do all the fucking coding if I have to. I want this tool to exist. I want there to be options other than "teaching yourself" and "giving up".

 

How mobile friendly an extension could you make? Because my current barrier is that I primarily read on mobile, and like, I really like the extension that lets you highlight your favorite parts of a fic to quote back in a comment as you read... But it super doesn't work on mobile, so I tend to not use any* comment extensions for this sort of thing.

*misspelled that

 

I don't actually know what the difficulty difference would be, making a script for a desktop browser versus the mobile, by the way! But I haven't owned a laptop in over two years at this point, so my primary fandom device *is* my phone, so while I think most people use desktop extensions, something mobile friendly is what would benefit me (and if you are taking requests, I would like to ask for it, please)

 

Honestly, as far as I can see there isn't much different in development, but I'm hesitant to go into mobile development for a couple of reason:

1) I'm bad at this, so whatever I do takes time, and I'd much rather use it where I can get the most out of it.

2) Extensions and userscripts need a lot of rejiggering to get them to run on phones, and I'd want someone who regularly sets them up to help me test and troubleshoot. I literally couldn't even the 0.1 version of Rekudo to work on my own phone b/c I'm phone-illiterate to the point where I don't even know how to google for solutions.

For mobile development the ideal case is that people find a way to get userscripts to work on their own devices, and I will then try to provide versions of the script that work on their devices/apps. An even more ideal case is if Mozilla just starts supporting Tampermonkey on mobile again, solving all our problems right there and then, lol.

(No joke I was briefly considering doing some Programming Crimes earlier today -- y'know, running the script inline on a site skin on Ao3 to make it accessible everywhere -- but turns out that's a non-starter b/c Ao3 has wisely disallowed scripts in their skin formats since it's obviously a huge security hole.)

There's also the matter of there being different parts to developing an extension, some of which I'm on even shakier ground than I am with the coding (a thing I am on extremely shaky ground with to begin with). I can just about handle myself when it comes to designing the functionality, and with some elbow grease I can even write the scripts, and I can probably just about handle making the actual user interface -- but I can't handle any of the user-facing writing. I don't know how to write help files, I don't know how to design an interface that doesn't horribly confuse people, and I don't know what kind of features people would want in the first place.

There's a lot of learning I already have to do, and I'm trying to prioritise the stuff I don't think I can easily find people to help me with.

 

Also thank you for bringing up copying highlighted text, I'm gonna go find out how to do that right away. That seems like an extremely useful tool in the belt if I actually keep going with this.

 

Yeah all of that makes sense. FWIW I use* Firefox mobile predominately and hard SAME on the tapermonkey thing. :cries: if mobile development were to ever change, and you wanted someone to beta test your extensions, I am definitely your man.

Iirc the highlight to text quote comment was a tapermonkey script, and I think I have a tumblr post about it saved for ref somewhere in my likes. It was very useful! If I can find it I'll send it your way so you can look at it. No need to reinvent the wheel if it's applicable. :)

I still really liked the "you have already left kudos here"=>comment button, since I reread fics a lot, and I'm really excited for a desktop extension!

*usese???

 

I promised myself I'd take a break from looking at code today so I don't burn myself out

but I know the thing is fucking broken and it's my job to fix it and I don't yet know how :((((

 

Detroit: Become Human is a deeply bad game, but it also has Lt Hank Anderson, so fuck me I guess.

Also I finished the new method so now the script works on all fics. Yay.

 

Me and my friend playing DBH for the third time not even pretending we're doing it for anything but horny reasons.

 

This is a deeply stupid game.

 

Today's "DBH has a premise that is not used at all" is that androids can get almost everywhere like the world's most convenient pen-tester b/c apparently in this world nobody has considered that people may pretend to be androids to gain access to places, or that androids may be programmed to use for corporate espionage and shit.