Code tour: 2017-01-28 to 2017-02-02 (omg image hosting)

[azurelunatic]

momijizukamori and I split this chunk of code tour, so here we go with the first half. This tour is for code being pushed tonight (assuming that between The Crud for one of the folks, and a power outage for another, everything's going to be good to go) so that everyone needs to hang on tighter (in order to keep from being thrown to the wolves).

17 items in this half of the code tour, brought to you by: long-time volunteer LivredOr returning, relatively new and delightful srukle, very busy DevCom kareila (aka karzilla), our own zorkian (mark), and the amazing rshatch DID I MENTION THE FACELIFT OF THE IMAGE HOSTING OMG WE HAVE IMAGE HOSTING.

On to the tour!

Issue 839: expose the breakpoint variables in the wizard
Category: Mobile-friendly Journal Styles
Patch by: LivredOr
Description: It's helpful to be able to tweak the exact screen size where things go from tiny-cellphone layout to medium-sized-screen layout. It's even more helpful if you can do this from a helpful series of menus rather than digging down into the obscure settings and coding it by hand.

Issue 1325: http://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit doesn't work with trailing slash (pull request)
Category: Making things make sense.
Patch by: kareila; reported by sporky_rat
Description: http://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit works! http://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit/ should also work. It didn't. Now it will.

Issue 1713: Allow embeds from JSFiddle (pull request)
Category: Embedding helpful things
Patch by: srukle
Description: JSFiddle is a useful site that offers embeds. And now it, too, will work in journal entries.

Issue 1744: Replying to PMs from OpenID users should Just Work but Really Doesn't (pull request)
Category: Making things make sense.
Patch by: kareila
Description: If you reply to a PM, it should Just Work. With OpenID users, it was giving errors instead, unless you used This One Weird Trick. And now that's left to clickbait than your actual inbox.

Issue 1796: copyright dates in footer need updating
Category: bringing us out of the Century of the Fruitbat
Patch by: rahaeli
Description: It's been 2017 for about a month and a half now, and code written in 2017 is being committed to the site. The copyright date in the footer will now reflect this.

Issue 1829: Start BlobStore (pull request)
Category: Back-end wizardry; bringing us out of the Century of the Fruitbat; OMG FILES
Patch by: zorkian
Description: Once upon a time, there were any number of variously "helpful" and "modern" ways to store userpics and other images. And they were brilliant for their time! Which was 2002 or so. There were also ... several ... of them. (Fun fact: MogileFS, the main one we're moving away from, is an anagram for OMG FILES.) And all of them involved making sure we had an engineer who a) understood file storage services, and b) had the time to keep them updated and without random little security problems and processor-eating runaway processes and stuff. You know, the usual.
BlobStore has two main uses. The first one: use the same thing for everything involving image storage! The second, it will eventually let Dreamwidth use something modern and/or built by someone who has the time and inclination to stay current.

Issue 1860: Whitelist embeds from OneDrive (pull request)
Category: Embedding
Patch by: kareila
Description: Another source of embeds that should now Just Work in journal entries.

Issue 1906: Whitelist embeds from Playmoss.com
Category: Embedding
Patch by: kareila
Description: Yet another place that people would want to embed things from in their entries.

Issue 1907: strip off http/https when checking OpenID logins
Category: Making things make sense; OpenID; https for the people!!
Patch by: kareila
Description: In terms of content, https://exampleusername.livejournal.com and http://exampleusername.livejournal.com should be exactly the same. The only thing that should be different is, the conversation between your computer (or Dreamwidth's servers) and LiveJournal is encrypted in the https version, and not encrypted in the http version. This should not result in two different OpenID accounts for exampleusername if they enter http:// when logging in one time, and https:// when logging in another time. And so.

Issue 1908: Whitelist embeds from 4shared.com
Category: Embedding
Patch by: kareila
Description: 4! 4 new embed sources on the allow-list so far! (I did not, in fact, deliberately move this to position 4, it was just right there.)

Issue 1915: ConfCheck (pull request)
Category: Code Machete
Patch by: kareila
Description: Despite the intriguing variables qw(*stab *thingy); this code wasn't ... actually ... currently being used for anything? So now Dreamwidth's code is 100% less stabby.

Issue 1920: Add to Embed whitelist: CNN, Wired
Category: Embedding
Patch by: kareila
Description: CNN and Wired are legitimate places that one might want to embed videos from.

Issue 1936: Most-requested file-manager tweaks for roll-out (pull request)
Category: OMG IMAGES; bringing us out of the Century of the Fruitbat; most requested
Patch by: rshatch
Description: The moment we've all* been waiting for!
Once upon a time, mark spawned a child process! Which was the impetus for a very rudimentary, if not to say hacky, image storage system on Dreamwidth to pop up very quietly overnight, and get hidden in the attic because it was so very very not ready to be seen by anyone except pre-beta users.
Several years later, user requests for native image hosting reached a fever pitch, and rshatch stepped up, to overhaul the appearance and add a few helpful features that would let non-geekfolk use and enjoy the feature.
AND HERE IT IS!!! You'll be able to visit https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/new and https://www.dreamwidth.org/file/edit to upload pictures and manage those you have already uploaded. http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=248 will contain more information once it's updated to match reality.
Of note: you won't be able to store pictures in your Dreamwidth hosting in order to use them on your website or whatever. That kind of stuff will chew up Dreamwidth's bandwidth pretty fast.

* All of us who want to include and store images on Dreamwidth itself, at least... ^

Issue 1939: don't let someone try to claim a deleted OpenID account
Category: OpenID, making things make sense
Patch by: kareila
Description: When you import your journal from another site, comments you had made show up under the OpenID account belonging to that identity. If you'd prefer that your own journal own those comments for whatever reason, there is a way to claim them. If you've somehow deleted that OpenID account, you should get an error that makes sense and tells you what to do about it (go and undelete that OpenID account) rather than a weird server error that doesn't tell you what went wrong and how to fix it.

Issue 1940: we should determine and enforce limits for media hosting (pull request)
Category: Making things make sense, OMG IMAGES
Patch by: kareila
Description: So, Dreamwidth will let you host images now. Officially. And to all good things there must be limits. For now, that limit is 500MB for everyone (total). This might change in the future depending on how things work out, but let's go with 500MB for now.

Issue 1942: link to file management in CORES menu (pull request)
Category: Making things make sense, OMG IMAGES
Patch by: kareila
Description: Things I did know: OMG IMAGE HOSTING; there are helpful menus across the site that let you find things. Also, the contents of those menus was determined at the beginning of the site with user research, where a very large handful of our actual users sorted possible menu items into piles based on where they'd expect to find them.
Things I did not know: those menus are collectively called the "CORES menu": standing for Create, Organize, Read, Explore, Shop. Clever!
Now "Manage Images" will be found under "Organize", and "Upload Images" will be found under "Create". (karzilla realized that there was already a link to one of those hiding in the code, just waiting for the day when we'd be ready to activate it. And that day is today!)

Issue 1946: Whitelist iframe embeds from Facebook
Category: Embedding
Patch by: kareila
Description: One last new embed source for this section of the tour: Facebook video. Only the non-JavaScript type, please...

Comments

[arethinn]

I'm a little sad, especially given that the patch was written by someone called zorkian, that BlobStore is not BlorbStore.

[zorkian]

HAHAHA. Yes! Alas, Blob is short for 'Binary Large OBject' so I went with it for being standard. (And admittedly had forgotten about Blorb! I really need to replay... it's been years!)