Wednesday – grey, damp, drizzly
Time to forget about political shenanigans and test the latest updates.
A few half-baked ideas have had a revisit over the past couple of days. The instant messaging system has been recoded and simplified. It's not quite working, but it shouldn't take much to sort out.
The reason the messenger was looked at was to grab some code for the 'feed' view – code that appends content to a scrolling div and scrolls it.
The image module has had an update. There's a new 'all' admin option that lists all versions of an image, and has 'rotate' buttons that trigger a refresh of all the related image variations.
And – mentioning image variations – I've finally set up a process for generating variations used by 'srcset'. The number of 'missing' variations now appears in page footers along with a script that occasionally pings the server. The original system used on-demand image creation, but risked causing things to slow down if a page featured a lot of images. It also meant that aggressive crawlers could create a huge demand for resources. The occasional request using JavaScript might be a bit slow, but it doesn't cause a slow user experience.
Symfony
Cacofony
I nearly forgot. The week started with a return to Symfony. Last year I looked at using it to rebuild one of my Half Baked Ideas – Cambridge Travel Guide. That ended up being largely re-writing using Python and Postres, so I've decided to use Local Journal as the new Symfony project. As can happen when impatiently cramming a new system, I hit a key issue that flummoxed me for most of an afternoon. Calling a method/function in one class from another – simple using flat PHP using 'global', but not so straightforward in Symfony it seemed. It turns out that it quite simple, it just took ages to work it out.
Now that that's sorted, I think it means I can port loads of my Typomania code into Symfony and create what I'm calling Cacofony. It's Nov 6 today, so using my amazing techy superpowers of time estimation, I'm going to say there will be a BETA version of Local Journal in Cacofony online in 2 weeks. Wednesday Nov 20. And if there isn't I'll eat van food. Wednesday nights are food truck nights at the Dyke's End in the next village.