I'm back to work updating OnePo's codebase to modern standards on the server side. Specifically async/await as opposed to callbacks. it's BOOOOO-RINNNNG. But I have "only" one file left. Of course, it's the one where most of the code is.

So after that I should refactor that file as well. Also BOOOOO-RINNNG, and yet somehow satisfying. Then maybe crank up eslint to call me on my shit. Poor man's typescript. Then maybe typescript?

Then rethink the frontend code. Using [ugh I will not even think about choosing a framework today].

Of course OnePo is still a tiny, tiny place. As in "I've never bothered to index the database collections for performance" tiny.  I may need to dial up the disk space just a tad soon though.

"But Tom, aren't you gearing up to welcome former Twitter residents?" No, not really, although the six people who will actually leave in this, the most recent of many outrages are warmly welcome.

Moderation of a successful public social media site is a huge, unsolved problem. As others continously have pointed out, the real challenge for something like Twitter is moderation, not engineering. Yes, it's bad that Musk's plan is basically to fire the moderators.

But I'm in no position to improve on that. There's no moderation in practice on OnePo at the moment, although I'm pledged to supply some in the event of certain types of abuse.

What we have instead is an invitation-only model and a predilection toward thoughtfully locked posts, which reduces (though it absolutely does not eliminate) the likelihood that someone you're connected to needs moderating... at least from your perspective. So far this seems to work OK for our needs.

But, a system like that cannot function as a public square. If we indulge my ego in imagining OnePo writ large, we wind up with a worse echo chamber than Twitter, because it's so difficult to discover new people and the general habit is to limit audiences for things.

Also, OnePo is just a whole 'nother idiom. The intersection of OnePo and Twitter is a ridiculous idea. That would be... uh... BeReal, actually. BeReal is pretty fun. But it does one tiny job.

Actually I kinda like the idea of doing one tiny job. OnePo's one tiny job is allowing friends to know and support each other better. That's fine for what it is, which is a lot.

Some small OnePo improvements and fixes:

• Making links to other pages the traditional way, via the "link" icon and the dialog box, works again on the iPhone.
• You can also make links by just pasting a link to any page straight into your post, without clicking the link button. When you do that, a nice automatic preview and link appears. We've had this for ages, but there was a dumb bug that broke it for most cases, except YouTube. All fixed. Here's a nice example (and a cool game):

You'll note I didn't have to create any content for that, I just pasted the address of the page straight into this post. This is based on the "open graph" tags that websites already provide for the benefit of Facebook sharing.

• Speaking of the automatic link feature: pasting a URL like that in the middle of your text once again splits the text into two sections, with the link preview in the middle.

As I mentioned, you can still make links the old-fashioned way too.

(At this point I don't care that I'll never be able to buy the domain onepo dot com. I'm still going to call it that, because how can you not?)

Hi gang,

I saw a couple of friends coping in a DIY way with a possible bug today (tough to say at this point), and it prompted some thoughts about how little attention I've given the platform in a long time. My last push to the server was... cough... two and a half years ago.

In a way this is not such a bad thing. Hey, it works!

But there's a lot that could be improved, and long-running bugs that haven't received attention (notifications for your own replies, anyone?), and believe it or not I'm still interested in the question of whether I did everything I could to make it easy for folks to onboard and, yes, grow the site.

But of course there's very little time.

Meanwhile... recently in another context I was facing pleas to do more in a space that's outside of my more essential responsibilities from day to day. I am very well supported at work. But as in any workplace there are gotta-haves, wanna-haves and really-oughta-haves and it can be tough to juggle them.

So I struggled to organize this really-ought-have stuff as a Project. But a Project implies a Budget and Time and there is no budget or pre-scheduled time for that particular thing right now (darn those pesky gotta-haves). That meant everything I was writing felt like a recipe for stress.

I felt stuck, and anxious.

Then I noticed a kanban board feature in our internal wiki and deliberately created an itty-bitty kanban board to track progress in that particular arena.

When I was asked if I wanted to turn it into a Project instead... I said "nope!" Because the medium is the message. Project = Milestones. Schedule. Release Dates. Time Pressure. All of which are appropriate when resources are available, and needlessly stressful when they are not.

But a kanban board says "hey... this is the art of the possible! Nibble at it. Bash at it. Occasionally really go at it. You'll get there."

My kanban board at work turned out very well and I'm still using it to nibble away at the oughta-have thing I can only work on occasionally.

So in the same spirit, I plan to set up a kanban board for One Post Wonder.

And today, in that kanban spirit, I did three itty bitty things to move the ball forward:

1. The "submit a bug" button just sends me a damn email. It used to post an issue to my github project, which was too clever by half. I didn't get any notifications, I didn't pay attention and you probably felt neglected. I'm sorry about that. This should be better.

2. I fixed an issue that caused gmail to reject some emails from One Post Wonder. There are services you can pay to deliver your emails reliably. Cost aside, I feel it's important that we try to maintain independence in this area. Even though it's a pain in the ass and an ever-moving target.

3. I changed the welcome message you see when you sign up from "each day, post a carefully curated sonnet concerning the state of world affairs or you will be punished with lasers" (*) to this:

"It doesn't matter if it's a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri."

I think this is way more welcoming, and I hope it will encourage people to feel like it's OK to just chill here. Lord knows I do. Shitpost away, everyone. You just can't do it more than once a day.

(*) It didn't really say that. It was far more well-intentioned but still kinda intimidating.

For a while I've thought it might be a little too confusing, the way One Post Wonder separates "following" people from "giving keys" to people. But, I also suspected this was just my ego talking: surely people would use One Post Wonder more if they only understoooood it!

Also, that distinction is hugely important to many of you. The way other social networks... socially engineer... connections you don't really want is something you've asked me to avoid.

So I haven't made any changes in this area in a while.

Today, though, I got feedback from two very smart-but-busy people who had the same confusion: they didn't catch that you have to give out keys if you want your friends to actually be able to read your wonderfully private posts.

So I made what I think is the right change.

When you follow someone, you are already given a chance to give them keys. But it's worded in a very chill way... it's sorta hard to tell if you have actually selected any keys or not... and if you click "Give Keys" without actually clicking any keys, there's no warning.

Accordingly, I added that warning message. And I also went ahead and added a bold-text message explaining bluntly that this ain't Facebook.

I think this will help a lot. Although, even as I look at it, I see a problem: we're referring to those buttons as "keys," and they have lock icons.

[Headslap]

... I'll fix that too. 😂

EDITED TO ADD: even more grease!

That should do it... I hope! 

Some things are new on One Post Wonder today:

1. Follow Fridays! This is very simple: on Friday, the "suggested topic" is always "who else should your friends follow on One Post Wonder?" and there's a little "Follow Friday" indicator. When posting, consider using the little-person icon, which is a handy way to mention someone in your post. It is my hope that this will help people who show up with just one or two connections and never really get "plugged in" beyond that. 
2. By popular request, the header bar now stays with you as you scroll, even on phones. But I am interested in feedback from folks who may have been happier the other way. Let's see how this goes.
3. Numbered lists (as you may be noticing).
4. Strikethrough (as you may be noticing).
5. The plaintext versions of important emails like account confirmation emails have working URLs in them. This is important to my fellow nerds people who for various valid reasons loathe HTML email, and possibly other corner cases.
6. When you paste a URL into your text and OPW makes a nice little presentation block out of it, the URL field gets populated right away.
7. The "bug report" icon is only available to logged-in users now. Which means no more spam for me to sort through. Which means I will pay better attention to your bug reports. w00t.

What would you like to see? What do you think would help the platform reach more people for the right reasons?

Insane day. A yadda yadda decided that everybody had to have a floopy blawnox 2016 because they didn't feel like maintaining floopy blawnox 2012's anymore even though they sort of promised but not really? And suddenly I had to cope with all the fallout because the floopy blawnox 2016 doesn't quite fit into the floobistan. Quite. Almost but not quite. You can make it work, but it takes all day and then you have to use a replicator to fix all the other floobistans but some of them are slightly irregular and you have to use the replicator AGAIN, and pretty soon it's 6pm.

In addition to my day job, this also impacted One Post Wonder, just now, as some of you who saw my test comments will likely have guessed. So here's hoping you can read this.

❤️,

#1 floopy blawnox herder

Hey oneposteristas,

Apparently posting from Android was jacked up big time.

Sorry.

I am embarrassed to say I post rarely enough from my own Android phone that I didn't experience this for much too long.

But, it's fixed now! I installed a newer version of ckeditor which resolved the underlying issue.

I also added a "+" button for adding the next tag, in case you're on a device that won't let me capture the comma key for that purpose, which has been my own experience on Android.

Please do not adjust your universe. The slight disquiet you feel is because I've moved OnePo, Boutell.Com, and everything else I run to a different hosting provider. I did that to get more storage, better backups, and more RAM for less money. More RAM, in this case, cuts down on disruptions when I deploy my other apps. The old b-com was running pretty close to its limits.

I've been banging on all the bits and validating that everything is here. For instance, I'm attaching a photo to this message.

That photo just about sums up my present situation: disordered but excellent.