August 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

I'm a few days late on this, but here's everything I worked on during the month of August, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Link Cleaner

I worked on a few interface and functional improvements for Link Cleaner this past month. The most notable change is the new social media share options, which appear below the primary buttons after a link is cleaned. The button for sharing to Mastodon was already available, but now it has been moved into that lower section. There are new buttons for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Telegram, and Substack Notes. Clicking one of the buttons will draft a new post on the specified platform (in a new window/tab) with the cleaned link attached.

There's also a new primary button: Test link. When you click that button, the cleaned link is opened in a new window/tab, so you can quickly verify that the cleaned link works as intended.

I also reworked the Mastodon share button to use an in-page modal popup, instead of a browser-level confirmation dialog, since those popups are effectively deprecated in modern browsers and don't work in Edge's side panel. Now, when you click the Mastodon button in Link Cleaner, you'll get a new centered popup confirmation that also explains the feature works with some non-Mastodon platforms. Just like before, the server you type is saved for future use.

Link Cleaner has included an option to convert Twitter links to vxTwitter links, which provide a better preview when shared through Discord, Slack, and other messaging platforms, and still redirect to the original post when clicked. I have changed the feature to use FixTweet instead, since that service handles polls, quote tweets, and other edge cases better than vxTwitter. The feature has also been updated to automatically detect "x.com" links in addition to "twitter.com" links.

Link Cleaner also now has another optional feature: replacing Bluesky post links with Psky. Just like the FixTweet feature, this gives you improved link previews in messaging apps, but for the Bluesky social media platform instead of Twitter/X.

Finally, there were a few bug fixes in August. Amazon product link detection has been improved (largely thanks to a code suggestion by GitHub user User3104), a settings bug was fixed, and the way settings are saved and loaded has been streamlined.

Other stuff

Unrelated to my web apps, I launched The Spacebar in August, which is a new blog and newsletter about technology. It already has some investigative pieces, historical retrospectives, and other interesting stuff. If you're interested, you can subscribe via email, Mastodon, or the RSS feed.