Technical Issue Upon Technical Issue

[andrewducker]

My Daily Link Poster has gone from "Will generate posts, but can't reach Dreamwidth to post them, so I have to manually copy/paste them into the DW Update page" to "Will not generate posts at all". Which looks to be because Google App Engine has upgraded to Java 8, and Velocity (the formatter which converts my posts from a bunch of link objects into HTML) is incompatible.

So I'd need to get it working again, and update that. And possibly also update Objectify, the database access layer I'm using. Which might mean an upgrade on the data format. And, also, the UI is written in Angular v1, which has been obsolete since 2016, and probably has all sorts of holes in it.

Oh, and the HTML build process was built around Gulp/npm, which has _also_ had incompatible upgrades since I last touched any of the code.

So the question is, do I put a lot of effort into upgrading all of that? Or do I write something from scratch again, which would probably be a not dissimilar amount of work, and a lot cleaner to work with? By the time I'm upgrading the back end tooling, the UI libraries, and the build process, there really isn't a lot of the original system left.

And, of course, no matter what I do, in another couple of years whatever technology I build it on will probably be obsolete _again_. *sigh*

The moral of the story is, of course, that nobody hates computers as much as people who work with them.

Comments

[ironymaiden]

For single links I've been doing this rube goldberg thing with Pinboard, Google Sheets, email, and IFTTT.

• I send a new link to Pinboard that includes the tag ".dw".


• IFTTT number one watches for that tag and adds it to a spreadsheet in Drive.


• IFTTT number two watches for new rows on that spreadsheet, and sends a markdown formatted email to my DW post by email address.


Noting here in case any of the pre-automated steps in the chain would make your rebuild less painful.

[andrewducker]

I use Dlvrit, which I pay for, to post to my Twitter and Facebook Page.

I mean, all it does is capture my DW username/password, and then once a day grab all of the links from the Pinboard RSS feed, keep the last 24 hours worth, format them, and post them.

It really shouldn't be that hard. But it's waaaay less important than spending time with Sophia, and making sure that Jane doesn't shoulder an unfair amount of the child-rearing.

[symbioid]

The moral of the story is, of course, that nobody hates computers as much as people who work with them.

Hear Hear!

[j_v_lynch]

Indeed!

[mtbc]

We've been having to adjust templates at work to drag ourselves to being able to use a more up-to-date Velocity.

[marahmarie]

I'd say nobody hates code as much as those who write it (the more I work on the hardware end of things the more "the same" I feel about it, but I've always enjoyed that, so it's probably just not gonna change).

Even something as supposedly simple as CSS, though...12 years of that and all it does is find new ways (speaking locally, mostly via my DW comment pages and Reading List) to break. I feel I could easily spend more time re-writing it then I do using the output. There's stuff in it to edit now but anything is more important... Like, just breathing qualifies.

To attempt to answer the question, though, a tear-down might be best. Even the better say, CSS rewrites I've done have looked good for a day (maybe a week) before showing themselves not up to snuff in various ways and were still carrying cruft. Just from the amount of code and libraries it sounds like you have to replace it's basically going to be re-building itself, anyhow.

[momentsmusicaux]

Should have used perl!

[andrewducker]

But *which* Perl?

[momentsmusicaux]

Haha.

Is perl 6 actually usable yet?

[andrewducker]

I thought it stabilised about two years ago?

[marahmarie]

What version is Dreamwidth on? (Maybe I'll find out somehow, eventually. It's one of those more arcane questions that like three people and one doc on a wiki somewhere might be able to answer.) It'd be nice if thanks to compatible Perl there was some interoperability between say, apps like yours and DW itself.

[erratio]

Clearly the answer here is to hang around coding bootcamp students and suggest that it would make a good project until one of them bites :p

[nancylebov]

I'd rather have a pile of naked links than nothing.

[marahmarie]

I wish I could +1 this a thousand times. I already miss his linkspams.

[channelpenguin]

sounds like (working) life.

We get to (have to) learn new things all the time just to be able to keep doing the things we can do.

Wait, that's diet and exercise and keeping our bodies working as well..

Entropy sucks!!!!

[agoodwinsmith]

I really miss your daily links. I agree with nancylebov.