commits 984e28b7 through a367c215 include changes that support following threads, hashtags and mentions:

• index pages for threads, hashtags and mentions include a follow/unfollow button
• following a thread, hashtag or mention results in notifications when new posts arrive that are part of the thread or include the hashtag or mention
• to support navigation and discovery, the details pages for posts include labels with links to the index pages for hashtags and mentions

next up is support for actively finding and fetching followed content from elsewhere in the fediverse.

also included are a bunch of bug fixes, some internal enhancements, and greatly reduced build times and executable sizes.

#ktistec

the crystal programming language always inlines blocks, which is great for performance but trades off space for speed. using blocks effectively means keeping this in mind.

somewhere along the line, i learned the habit of passing a block to a function as a means of customizing the behavior of the function. if the function that takes the block is large, it's important to remember that the body of the function is inlined where the function is called, which may not be what you are expecting. if you call the function multiple times, you even get multiple copies.

i just committed code that fixes an egregious example of this problem. in this case these ~30 lines of code replace the blocks with procs (which aren't inlined) and cut ~24mb (that's megabytes) off the executable (over a third of its size).

i regularly shoot myself in the foot trying to be clever, so i don' t know how prevalent this problem is in practice, but it's definitely something to keep in mind, especially if you see compile times and executable sizes growing!

#crystallang #ktistec

one of the crystal programming language’s greatest strengths is the ease with which you can work with c apis and external libraries without leaving crystal. you can even implement callbacks in crystal!

in sqlite you can define new functions—callable from sql—with sqlite3_create_function by providing a name and a callback that implements the function. i created a new function called strip, entirely in crystal, that removes html markup and leaves text. it can be used in a sql query like so:

select * from objects
where strip(content) like "%term%"

it’s part of the recently released content filtering code.

#crystallang #ktistec

I just released v2.0.0-8 of ktistec. The most impactful changes are:

1. No more dependencies on externally hosted assets (and fewer dependencies, overall)
2. Basic support for timeline filters (no shares and no replies).
3. Support for content filtering by keyword.

Volume has dropped off in my timeline, for the most part, now that the surge of people who signed up for Mastodon accounts a couple months ago have gone back to posting on Twitter, or have stopped posted about the transition, or whatever. But fine grained control is nice, and filtering allows me to tune my experience—better late than never!

Read the changelog for all of the details.

#ktistec

i released 2.0.0-7 just in time for the new year.  it includes contributions from @relistan and @rahul, the introduction of CI (the build is successful), and bug fixes.

i am slowly working my way toward more flexibility for reading and managing federated content.

#ktistec (as always, it's pronounced "tiz-tek")

getting starting on my new year's 🥂 resolutions early. added a changelog to ktistec.

the changelog covers changes back to v1.0.0, which was released about this time last year!

#ktistec

i finally set up ci for ktistec. surprisingly, it only uncovered one mysterious build issue...

#ktistec

(i should probably just add support for mastodon style polls to ktistec...)

i have an informal poll for ktistec users. should we require (and use features from) the most recent versions of sqlite? how recent is too recent? if you're running ktistec, i'd love your point of view.

some background... sqlite is the most significant dependency in ktistec. to minimize problems for potential users, i intentionally stuck to features found in "older" versions of sqlite. as i write this, the current version of sqlite is 3.40.0.  ktistec only depends on 3.11.0, which was released in 2016. that's very conservative.

#ktistec

Today's release of code fixes things that have been annoying me for a while: 

• Commits c01e797 to b21a97a ensure that bulk assignment raises an error when the type of an argument value does not match that of the corresponding property being assigned to. In the past, attempts were silently ignored. As you'd expect, adding the check and raising the error was easy—cleaning up all the places I'd carelessly passed in nil and other garbage was not. Lesson learned? We'll see...
• While I'm in there, commits 1ac498e to 3d45ece ensure that bulk assignment raises an error when attempting to assign a property defined only by a getter (which is, effectively, a read-only property). Previously, this code wouldn't even compile, thereby unintentionally coupling database persistence and bulk assignability.
• Finally, commits 5c2ec70 to 99dca65 clean up a few small defects in presentation: wide blocks of code no longer blow out the width of the parent container, image attachments present at ratios closer to what Mastodon uses (the presumption being that's what people optimize for if they optimize for anything) (this should also fix issue #53), and figure captions get a little breathing room. I'm no good at CSS, so this kind of thing takes me forever.

#ktistec

i built @relistan 's branch this morning and tried out ktistec support for mastodon profile metadata. the attachment shows profile metadata pulled from the ruby.social mastodon instance, as well as @relistan 's own personal ktistec instance. this is something i've wanted for a long time!

a shoutout is due both these two (the owners of the two profiles shown in the attachment): @alexanderadam has been posting encouragement about ktistec all year long, and maybe before—an intangible that's immensely valuable when you're banging away on open source software—and @relistan is the first person besides me to contribute major feature functionality to the project—which takes a huge leap of faith.

thanks!

#ktistec