Category: Web

Reblog via Nathan Wrigley

The book Pull Requests and Code Review: Best Practices for Developers has been pointed out to me by my colleague Paulo Pinto, and I liked it.

I always find it hard to express what a makes a good code review, this book attempts to describe it. There are probably lots of other opinions about and for better recommendations but I liked this one for it trying to give some advice that I can agree with.

You can buy the book for “name-your-price” or check out the Github repo and download or build the format you want to read it in.

It has been a somewhat interesting coincidence that I am currently without voice because of a cold, and OpenAI has just released some really good Text-to-Speech voices with their Create speech API. So in preparation for a meeting today, I created a little script that will output the spoke audio what I typed.

Since the voice will read exactly what’s there, I added a spell fixer that will (through ChatGPT) automatically fix typos before it’s sent to the audio API.

$ php talk.php
Voice: echo
Fix spelling: off
Speed: 1.0
> hi everyone and welcoem to tis meetin
> sc
Fix spelling: on
> hi everyone and welcoem to tis meetin
Hi everyone and welcome to this meeting.
> s2
Speed: 2
> my voice is gone because of a pretty string cold that iv pickd up
My voice is gone because of a pretty strong cold that I've picked up.
> s1.1
Speed: 1.1
> my voice is gone because of a pretty string cold that iv pickd up
My voice is gone because of a pretty strong cold that I've picked up.
> turns out, even suing the streaming audio aip, typing and then waiting for the srsult is too lsow for a conversation. but it's been interesting
Turns out, even using the streaming audio API, typing and then waiting for the result is too slow for a conversation. But it's been interesting.
> sc
Fix spelling: off
> without spell fixer it's faster but for good intonation it only makes sense to send full sentences, not single words as soon as they have been typed. maybe that can also be solved, but that's for the next experiment

In any case, it’s been fun. Thanks Simon for highlighting the API.

This is the presentation I held yesterday, November 7, 2018, at the WordPress Meetup Vienna about the Friends Plugin.

I created this presentation with Deckset which allows to generate the presentation from a Markdown file.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on the side on a WordPress plugin that implements an idea that has been growing in me over the last couple of years. Decentralized Social Networking. The plugin that does it is called Friends.

Starting with the frustration that there are few alternatives for people who use Facebook: if you don’t want them to own your data but still want to privately keep your friends and family up to date about your live and discuss what interests you, where do you go?

I realize that many people just switched to instant messaging (like WhatApp) which does allow exchanging private messages (and photos) with your friends, but overall I do like the idea of having a more structured publishing platform. I just don’t like a single entity to control it all.

So I realized: We actually had an alternative all along: blogging.

Blogging is decentralized: you decide where you host, you decide which blogs you read and nobody really knows which ones you have subscribed to.

What disqualifies it as an alternative to my wish to keep friends and family up to date, is that it public by default. While there is the option to publish something as “private,” there is not a lot you can then do with a privately published post.

So what if you were easily able to give your friends access to your private posts?

Here comes the Friends plugin. And with it, the downside to the solution:

You need to have your own blog to become friends with each other.

Right now, this is only implemented on WordPress, the technology is framework agnostic, though.

When everyone involved has their own blogging platform and they’d decide where they want to host, we automatically get a decentralized platform.

The technological ingredients to this are actually pretty old:

• RSS
• REST API
• Authentication via keys

After friendship has been established (this involves both parties accepting friendship and exchange private keys in the background), your server will use that key when requesting your friend’s RSS feed which will in turn (since you are friends) contain private posts. And vice versa.

For commenting, you’ll go to your friend’s blog, it’s a one-click-authentication away. This can also eliminate spam if you only allow friends to comment on your posts.

All of this is highly compatible with standard WordPress: if you want to accept a friend request on your mobile phone, use the WordPress iOS or Android app and change that user’s role to “Friend.”

Chicken-and-egg problem: I use a social network because all my friends are there.

So why use a social network that not all of your friends use (yet)? Because the Friends plugin is actually a pretty decent way to consume RSS feeds.

Since it is based on RSS, it means you can also subscribe any blog or website that offers this well-established way of distributing content.

As you are in control of the server, you can also decide what you’re interested in and tailor the feeds to your liking: you can define rules for incoming feed items and ignore posts you know you won’t be interested in.

I personally like to consume notifications via e-mail as it provides read/unread functionality and I can sort and categorize e-mails to my needs. You can now also read your friends’ posts (or subscriptions) via e-mail. But you don’t need to.

Another method to view your friend posts and subscriptions is the “Friends Page,” a timeline of friend posts and subscriptions. You can therefore scroll down the list of your friend’s posts and subcriptions, just as you see it people doing it all the time on Facebook.

There is quite a bit more to this, you can Emoji react to a post, recommend it specifically to friends, have sections in your posts for friends/not-friends, and more.

• 

• 

• 

Overall, I see this as a way to take blogging to the next level: Choose your private audience. Choose where you host. Publish publically if it’s meant to be public.

It’s clear that setting up and having your own blog is not (yet) for everyone. It’s more work than just signing up for some social network. Often you’ll need to pay for hosting (and domain). But it also gives you the freedom to take your data somewhere else if you want to. Or delete it.

We’ll have to see who will use this. As of now, it’s for a technical audience but maybe someday there will be dedicated Friends-WordPress hosting?

The Friends Plugin is open source under GPL2. If you have a WordPress blog, try it out, and if you think this could be better, different, enhanced: create an issue, or better: create a patch and send a pull request.

Probably it’s not ready for prime time yet, we’re at version 0.14. But it’s getting there, at least I am already using it daily :) There are many ideas left to be implmented, and these are only mine so far.

Oh, if you happen to be in Vienna coming week, I’m going to talk about Decentralized Social Networking with WordPress at our WordPress meetup on November 7, 2018.

November WordPress Meetup Vienna

Wednesday, Nov 7, 2018, 6:30 PM

CodeFactory Vienna
Kettenbrückengasse 23/2/12 Wien, AT

29 People Attending

Schedule 18:30 | Arrival, Registration 19:00 | Welcome & Introduction 19:15 | Alex Kirk – Decentralized Social Networking with WordPress 19:45 | Break 20:00 | Harry Martin – Hello to 5.0, a first look at the next major release and the new theme Twenty Nineteen 20:30 | Socialising! 21:00 | Leaving CodeFactory, maybe for drinks somewhere close by __…

Check out this Meetup →

Recently I've had the issue to have a completely unsorted Photo Library in Android after migrating to a new phone. The reason is that WhatsApp images are copied into internal storage and end up with the last modification date when they were copied, thus conglomerating together when they should be spread out over time.

The problem is not that trivially to solve because you cannot mount internal storage into a computer and then modify the file dates. Thankfully, I was still able to create a viable solution using a bash script.

It all revolves around the Android Terminal Emulator Termux which allows you to execute scripts on your phone.

1. Install Termux .
2. Grant Termux access to your storage directories.
3. Install core tools apt install coreutils
4. Copy this script into your file tree (for example via Android File Transfer):

for f in IMG-20* VID-20* AUD-20*; do
    [ -e "$f" ] || continue
    NEWDATE=`echo $f | cut -c5-8`-`echo $f | cut -c9-10`-`echo $f | cut -c10-11`
    echo touch -d $NEWDATE "$f"
    touch -d $NEWDATE "$f"
done

5. Run the script in the directories you need to fix file dates (for example in /storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp/Media/WhatsApp Images)
6. Delete the data of MediaStorage (and maybe reboot) to make Android re-index the files with the new file dates.

This year, 2016, the Vienna WordCamp team (which includes me) was able to get WordCamp Europe to come to Vienna. So may I present to you:

WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna from June 24-26

Unfortunately it is constantly sold out, but there is a waiting list, should you still decide to come.

Looking forward to the event in June!