Tag: projects

As part of my plan to spend more time bikeshedding building out my web presence than actually creating content, I wanted to build an iOS app that allowed me to share short snippets of text or photos to my blog. I've also always wanted to understand Swift generally and building an iOS app specifically, so it seemed like a nice little rabbit hole.

As I was evaluating the options, in addition to the dealbreakers, I kept finding small annoyances. The backend interface was confusing, or required too many clicks to get from place to place; the speed to first paint was insane; just the time waiting for the content editor to load after I clicked it seemed interminable. At the same time, I was also going through a similarly frustrating experience with cloud music managers, each with a vital missing feature or that implemented a feature in a wonky way.

Then I had an epiphany: Why not just build my own?

Thus was born Newslurp. It's not pretty. I will 100% admit that. The admin interface can be charitably described as "synthwave brutalist." That's because you really shouldn't spend any time there. The whole point is to set it up once and never have to touch the thing again. The interface really only exists so that you can check to see if a specific newsletter was processed.

It's not perfect. There are some newsletters that depend on a weirdly large amount of formatting, and more that have weird assumptions about background color. I've tried to fix those as I saw them, but there are a lot more mistakes out there than I could ever fix. Hopefully they include a "view in browser" link.

There is one thing that any aspiring programmer must realize when they set out to replace a tool: YOU CAN'T REPLACE A TOOL AT THE HEART OF A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION ON YOUR OWN. I knew this academically but, as is often the case when setting out on these adventures, my brain chose to heed that advice only when it was convenient to do so.

I often live by the mantra, "If someone else can do it, that means it's possible." It works well something like 75 percent of the time — it prevents me from feeling daunted when facing large projects, but it can be turned around as well.

It was what you’d call a “hard-and-fast” deadline: Our contract with Caspio for database and data services was changing on July 1. On that day, our account — which to that point had been averaging something like 17GB transferred per month — would have to use no more than 5GB of data per month, or else we’d pay to the tune of $50/GB.

Our biggest data ab/user by far was our user-submitted photo galleries. A popular feature among our readers, it allowed them to both upload photos for us (at print quality) to use in the paper as well as see them online instanteously. Caspio stored and displayed them as a database: Here’s a page of a bunch of photos, click one to get the larger version.

We had to come up with something to replace it — and, as ever, without incurring m/any charges, because we don’t have any money to spend.

This problem was compounded when we decided on the scope of the project Our high school football coverage is run by GameTimePA, which consists of the sports journalists from the York Daily Record, Hanover Evening Sun, Chambersburg Public Opinion and Lebanon Daily News. The four newsrooms are considered a "cluster," which means that we're relatively close geographically and tend to work together. Since the last preview, however, GameTimePA had expanded to include our corporate siblings in the Philadelphia area, meaning we now encompassed something like 10 newsrooms stretching from Central Pennsylvania to the New Jersey border.

And we're all on different CMSes.