don't confuse Ruby and Rails

thankfully, the new ios 26 liquid glass user interface doesn't look nearly as bad as many of the photos made it look. it feels like a little nod to the skeuomorphic designs of years past...

After much pain, I have light-mode, dark-mode, and themes support in #ktistec. To celebrate, I implemented the Dracula theme.

Theme support was brought to you by Mothership Connection, on repeat—when CSS ails you, funk is the cure.

the weirdest unsolicited things get sent to this server... i'm getting weather reports from a bot now. i don't follow it. no one shared or liked the posts. something is just dropping them into my inbox...

i removed over half of the custom colors i was using in the #ktistec user-interface. it may look slightly less interesting but it will be far easier to maintain.

centralization always leads to the same destination. that’s why I built #ktistec and why it only supports one user*

*okay, soon to support a small number of users, but the point still stands

I think one of the strangest things about "application software development" is that an essential skill in the development process consists of taking requirements expressed in human language and manually translating them into cryptic (to most people) programming language syntax.

Of course this isn’t desirable, and we've tried so many things to change that over time: programming languages are themselves abstractions over lower-level machine language, we invented disciplines like CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) and methodologies like Shlaer-Mellor to assist with or automate the creation of the source code, we invented categories of products like low-code and no-code tools to change the building blocks themselves. None of that really changed the nature of application software development.

Now, we find ourselves in 2025 contemplating/confronting the literal opportunity/challenge/threat of telling a machine what we want in a human language and having them build the application. The fact that we are here surprises me. That it works at all surprises me.

That the state of the art comes down to “prompt engineering” and trying to jury-rig business requirements to satisfy an LLM does seem a little weird though.

I was planning on adding support for custom themes in release v2.4.13 of Ktistec. That turned out to be difficult, so I implemented post visibility instead—which then also turned out to be difficult. C'est la vie.

The editor now includes radio buttons for controlling post distribution and visibility. In particular, you can now send messages directly to mentioned users without sending them to all of your followers.

You can also mark posts as sensitive using the content warning checkbox in the editor. Sensitive posts are hidden behind a summary that readers can click to reveal the content.

This release of Ktistec includes RSS feeds and RSS feed discovery. RSS feeds are currently available for the site home page and account pages.

Here's the full changelog:

Added

• Support RSS feeds on the home page and account pages. (fixes #14)
• Hide sensitive content, spoilers, etc. with content warnings.
• Support direct messages with proper visibility controls.

Changed

• Switch from calendar-based periods to duration-based periods in charts.

Fixed

• Track and federate object updates.
• Fix object visibility bugs in object replies and threads.

#ktistec #fediverse #activitypub #crystallang