monkinetic the blog

Fedi/Mastodon programmers… with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a “local” ID that is suitable for passing as the “inReplyToID” in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the “local” ID?

#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Mordecai Martin, a thinker and writer who I follow on Play Vicious, posted this powerful piece on the Jewish response to racial protests and - yes looting - during the 60s and now with the George Floyd protests.

I’m not sure that – being neither Jewish nor black – I have a platform for comment, but Mo’s writing speaks to his own Jewish people with real power and love.

As Artist Marcia X on Play Vicious responded:

imagine being this tender and powerful at the same time???

I’ve started messing around a bit with javascript-enhanced UIs for #goldfrog. Rather than use all of JQuery, I decided on a small subset of Jquery’s functionality as implemented by Sprint.JS.

1. I only load the JS for me, since I’m logged in.
2. It’s only used on the home page to power the new switchable post form, and
3. It powers a character-counter for the note UI.

Here’s the new posting UI:

I’m trying to implement some basic progressive enhancement - the forms work as is without javascript, but the switcher and the counter are niceties for me, the author.

Sometimes in software design it’s great to develop a visual of the system in question to help in the thinking process.

Josh Barratt is a software architect at Twilio, and blogs about system design at [Serialized.Net]((https://serialized.net/). His recent post Effective Technical Diagrams has some great guidelines for improving the technical diagrams that we use to communicate.

Images convey ideas and structure far more effectively than text. Especially for software systems, they can even help with reasoning about things like capacity, connectivity, reliability, security and performance.

Like any craft, methods of designing visuals that communicate effectively and efficiently can be studied and improved. We have probably all seen diagrams which led to an immediate “aha!” – and others, that after minutes of squinting, led to only more confusion.

I too, adore OmniGraffle, and have made my share of good and bad technical diagrams in my pursuit of a better design. Here’s one I made in the last year, the usefulness of which could be argued both ways:

I recently found the following in a bit of #python sample code:

random_data = random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8)

Wait, hexdigits? I’d use string.ascii_letters and string.ascii_lowercase before, but this was the first time I’d seen hexdigits, which is exactly what you’d think:

The string ‘0123456789abcdefABCDEF’.

That’s useful.

Dammit

For a bit of variety, I decided to figure out how to generate a new front page header background and link colors whenever I rebuilt the blog (new posts, etc). This is still a static site, so no wizzy javascript stuff, I just wanted to do it in SASS.

This is what I came up with.

    $colors-list: (
      // background color, link color
      #DAE076 #AD5C55,
      #A9C9C5 #4A676D,
      #AD5C55 #5E7D68,
      #374768 #718A8A,
    );
    $color-index: random(length($colors-list));
    
    // Header description box
    $colors: nth($colors-list, $color-index);
    $header-desc-background-color: nth($colors, 1);
    // Link color
    $link-color: nth($colors, 2);

I may rework this as a map (dictionary) later on so I can add other theme-y things, but it was kinda fun to work out for now.