January 2024 Work Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here's everything I worked on during the month of January 2024, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

The Spacebar

I published five articles on The Spacebar in January:

- You probably don't need a VPN
- How to install Microsoft Copilot on Mac
- The most exciting 2024 tech isn't AI
- How to install WordPad on Windows 11
- Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX 

I also enabled Google AdSense advertisements on the site, mostly to help cover the $9/mo hosting from Ghost. The ads are limited to banners every few paragraphs, and there are no floating elements, so they're fairly unobtrusive. I'm still experimenting with the best way to handle ads—maybe they can be turned off for Patreon subscribers? I'm still not sure what's technically possible here.

I made one other change to the public site this month: disabling comments. I generally like article comments, but they require moderation (the Opera and Brave browser articles in particular attracted some awful stuff), and the comment system in Ghost makes deleting comments a multi-step process.

I noticed man other Ghost blogs limit comments to paying subscribers, but The Spacebar isn't monetized in that way, so that's not an option. I might look into alternative comment systems in the future, but for now, the comments are just staying off. hateful discussions

ImageShare

This month I released ImageShare 24.01, a significant update for my image uploader web app (and the first versioned release!). I already talked about it in a separate Patreon post, so I won't go over all that again. Since that update, the number of unique users on the main server has roughly doubled, so that's cool! 

I also released a small bugfix v24.01.1 update this month, which fixes a blank page when uploading some types of images (I noticed iPhone photos as one example) and added the version number to the main page. Thanks to Spaghetto in the Discord for helping test that bugfix!

As a side note, one of the recurring issues with ImageShare is that the Nintendo 3DS family is the main target, but I only have a New Nintendo 3DS to test with and the web browser on the original models is completely different. After some setup, it turns out I can use the Citra emulator to test on the original 3DS firmware and web browser!

I can now confirm that ImageShare still works great on the original Nintendo 3DS, in addition to the New 3DS, and a bunch of other legacy web browsers.

Wii Shop Channel Music

One quick note for my Wii Shop Channel Music extension: I'm hoping to go through all the pull requests and bug reports during February, and hopefully get the Manifest V3-compliant version done by the end of the month. Google will start shutting off Manifest V2 extensions in June.