December 2023 Work Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! This is the first month of my refocused Patreon page. Here's everything I worked on in the month of December, and my plans for this page, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Patreon Changes

This Patreon page has always been focused exclusively on supporting my software development work. I have started branching out more over the past two years, creating the Tech Tales Podcast and The Spacebar newsletter/blog. Podcasts and newsletters generally have different expectations for recurring donations/subscriptions, like exclusive episodes or articles, so it has made me think about how they should fit into this Patreon page.

I have opted for the simple option: this page is now for everything I work on, including software development, podcasts, and my newsletter. I work on at least one of those three categories every month (usually all three to varying extents), and all of them have recurring costs for hosting, so one Patreon page covering everything makes the most sense for now.

I have updated the Discord server with new channels for Tech Tales and The Spacebar, and you still get a special flair on your name while you're a Patreon supporter. Come hang out if you want!

The updates for my Patreon page (like a full list of hosting costs) are still in progress, and I'm still thinking about rewards I can offer for the two existing Patreon tiers. Maybe early access to Tech Tales episodes? Let me know if you have an idea.

The Spacebar

I published several articles on The Spacebar in December:

- Tech media doesn't understand ad blockers or Chrome extensions
- The best (and worst) video games I played in 2023
- I want to leave the Dynamic Island
- YouTube can't stop showing me AI deepfake ads

I also migrated The Spacebar from Substack to Ghost CMS in December, due to Substack executives continuing to allow (and profit from) extremist far-right content. I'm happy to report nothing went wrong with the migration: no broken links, the email list moved over, the RSS feed still works, etc. The downside is that Ghost costs me $9/mo, while Substack was free, which is part of the reason I'm now including it in my Patreon umbrella.

You can subscribe to The Spacebar through RSS, the Mastodon account, email subscription, or Google News.

Link Cleaner

I rolled out a few updates to my Link Cleaner web app during December. The main improvement is that the "Show QR Code" button now uses the EasyQRCodeJS library to generate the QR code instead of a deprecated Google API. That means there's no longer a network delay when loading the QR code, and it works offline like the rest of Link Cleaner.

The new QR code generation is also a privacy improvement since the URL doesn't leave your device to create the QR image. Before this, the QR code wasn't requested from Google's API until you clicked the button (which is also why there was a network delay).

I also slightly improved the Bulk Mode page in Link Cleaner. It now has the same header design as the History and Settings pages, and the text areas for the input and result now stretch to fill the window height.

Finally, I spent some time to revamp how Link Cleaner processes YouTube links, and how that connects to the optional YouTube link shortening setting. It's surprisingly difficult to get that working well because YouTube has so many link formats!

ImageShare

ImageShare is my web app for uploading and sharing images on low-end and legacy web browsers. It temporarily broke in May 2023 when the Imgur API for uploading images stopped working, and at that time I made a rough backup system that used ImgBB as the image host. The Imgur API has gone back and forth in reliability, but at this point it seems to be totally blocking requests from the server hosting the web app.

In December, I started working on a major update for ImageShare with the ability to choose the upload method. Instead of Imgur being the default option and ImgBB being the fallback, there's a choice upfront, and if an error occurs then you just go back and pick the different one. This also makes it easier to add more services in the future, if I find any that work for this use case.

Note: This is a WIP interface

There's a third new option: the ability to upload images using your own API key. When you use an API key associated with your ImgBB account (both the account and API key are free), the images are saved in the ImgBB account, which can be accessed from any other device through the web browser. It's a roundabout way of accomplishing a feature I've wanted to have for a long time: not having to scan a QR code after every upload.

I'm also doing some more code cleanup, design fixes (the QR code isn't stretched anymore on browsers like Netscape 6) as well as improving the setup and documentation for people setting up ImageShare on their own servers. If everything works, I'll remove the Imgur API access from my own server (because it's being blocked anyway) and try adding it back in a few months.

I have more testing and code fixes to do before the ImageShare update is ready. Stay tuned!

NoPlugin

I used to work on a browser extension called NoPlugin, which detected old plugin embeds in web pages and converted them to HTML5 players where possible (and sometimes helped you open files in VLC Media Player or Adobe Flash). It was becoming a lot of work to maintain and update, and it had low ratings on the Chrome Web Store and Firefox add-ons site (because people left one-star reviews when it didn't work on a few pages).

I shut down development on NoPlugin in November 2021 for those reasons, and I put a call out for any interested developers to contact me about possibly taking over the extension. In the two years since then, I only received a handful of offers, and they're from the same companies that want to buy my other extensions just to inject advertising and tracking code.

I have now unpublished NoPlugin from the Chrome Web Store and Firefox add-ons site, and the extension will stop functioning in Chrome sometime in 2024, when Google starts enforcing Manifest V3. It will remain installed for existing users until Google or Mozilla breaks it.

Cobalt

This month I decided to retire Cobalt, the FreeDOS-based operating system that was in an early alpha state. I was having trouble getting it to work as a Live USB installer, and other automation issues were preventing me from building ready-to-use images for virtual machines, which was my main goal for the project. Maybe I'll come back to it in the future (the current project is already a reboot), but for now I'm focusing on other stuff.