August 2024 Work Log

Hey everyone! This is everything I worked on during the month of August, exclusively for patrons.

Share to Mastodon

This month I finally finished up and released a new update for Share to Mastodon, my browser extension for sharing links with the Mastodon social network. This was primarily a bug-fix release with some code cleanup, but I did have the chance to add one functional change: better server icons in the share popup.

When you share a link with the toolbar button or keyboard shortcut, you get a popup with a list of your saved servers—the right-click menu has the servers as list items, skipping this step. The list in the popup includes an icon for each server. This is helpful because some servers have custom icons, and when using Mastodon-compatible servers like Elk or Misskey, a default Mastodon icon wouldn't be correct.

Previous versions of the extension used the server's favicon image, but that was low-resolution, and didn't always work (especially for non-Mastodon servers). In addition, the upcoming Mastodon 4.3 release (which is already live on mastodon.social) doesn't serve a favicon at the root directory at all.

The Share to Mastodon update includes a lot of new code to support this seemingly-basic functionality. It now tries to request the server icon with the official Mastodon API, which works for servers running Mastodon 4.3 or newer. If that feature isn't available, it tries to load the favicon instead. If that doesn't work, the extension shows a default Mastodon icon.

The next upgrade I want to implement is support for Bluesky, with the same ability to add and manage multiple servers for easy sharing. Maybe the extension will need a new name? Share to Bluesky and Mastodon?

ImageShare

I talked about rewriting ImageShare (again) in last month's work log, with the goal of creating a more manageable and fully self-hostable service. That's still a work in progress, and I made more progress last month.

When you upload an image with ImageShare, it sends the image to an external host (either Imgur or ImgBB), the host sends back the live URL to the image, and ImageShare uses another service (goQR.me, previously Google) to create a QR code to that image. That way, you can scan the code and get the uploaded image on another device.

This new in-development version of ImageShare already replaced the external image hosts with internal hosting, and now the QR code is also rendered by the ImageShare server. The user experience is still the same (as seen in the above screenshots on a Nintendo 3DS), but this change removes the final external service dependency in ImageShare. The server now handles the web UI, uploading and hosting images, and rendering the QR codes all by itself.

The next step is implementing HTTPS support on the new Node server, and wrapping it all up in a Docker container, like the current PHP-based version.

The Spacebar

This was the one year anniversary of The Spacebar going live! 🎂 I wrote two articles on The Spacebar this month:

• The first year of The Spacebar

• This is the best way to download videos and audio

As a reminder, you can follow The Spacebar on Mastodon, RSS, email, and Google News.

Link Cleaner

I rolled out several improvements to Link Cleaner in August. First, Link Cleaner can now be installed as a search engine in most desktop web browsers, allowing you to clean URLs right from the address bar. You simply "search" with a URL instead of a typical search engine query.

When you open Link Cleaner, Firefox will show it as a new button in the search box (address bar), and Chrome adds it as an option in the list of search engines (chrome://settings/searchEngines). I plan to document this in more detail inside the app in the future, along with instructions for using a bookmarklet.

I also reworked the cleaning code for YouTube links, which fixed some bugs, like YouTube playlist links breaking after cleaning. Lenovo store links also don't break after cleaning anymore.