Hey Steven, I'm thinking of renaming Ode, "Ebeling". Any thoughts about that? It's because of this guy Robert Ebling. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself
He kind of epitomizes how I feel about technology – Going along with what everyone is doing because everyone else seems to be OK with it is in no way OK.
I also like that the name is easier to pronounce and kind of sounds like an open source project.
I'm just looking for a little feedback.
@jgbrwn Hi. Thanks the message. Out of curiosity, what are you thinking about using Ode for?
Yes it's not generally available at the moment. I'm working on a significant update. I'll be honest that's it's long overdue but I am committed to the project and making it more of a priority so that it gets done sooner rather than later.
The next version will still be a Perl CGI. After that I may rewrite it for JavaScript . Not much will change about the existing functionality because honestly it works really well, and I like it. But there can be some refinements for sure and there is some much needed functionality. The goal is a platform that is (or continues to be):
• Approachable for people new to programming
• Bullet proof for server and local installations
• Syncs seamlessly
• Generates and caches pages in response to requests on the fly
• Works with git for version control, backup, migration, and collaboration
• Does all of the things Ode does as well or better than everything including themes for example
Would something like that work for you?
Thanks again! Rob
Hey Steven, I'm thinking of renaming Ode, "Ebeling". Any thoughts about that? It's because of this guy Robert Ebling. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself
Sounds good to me.
(I cleaned this up some and I'm reposting it).
Glad you found the gitter community. It's nice to know gitter is sitting here serving this purpose and doing a decent job of it.
Anyway, Ode, I mean ebeling… (I am committed to the name change but it's going to take a while for it to stick. It already sounds less strange to me than it used to.)
I am planning on a next release. I've been saying that for a while. I need to figure out how to work on it consistently. The goal for ebeling is for it to be essentially what it is - a self-hosted, super simple, yet very functional, bulletproof platform with a minimum of dependencies.
It's not intended to be the app the cool kids are using for 6 months. That does create some problems. For one, I think there is a minimum viable community. I'm a little torn about that because I do think ebeling is something uniquely good and deserves to exist.
As for specific plans, I have lots, all of them very doable.
There are small things… I need to put together a basic authentication mechanism. Currently you can create posts by connecting to the server and savings posts directly with a text editor, which I highly recommend because it's the best possible experience. (Web forms suck for writing.) There is also an addin that allows posts to be created through a browser, but it has only a basic password mechanism and depends on TLS for security (which is technically fine in terms of security but not ideal). There are quite a few little things like that. Oh, I need to write a search addin for one thing.
Beyond those things I'd like to focus on making sure it can run absolutely everywhere and although I see a lot of value in an (improved) manual install, it would be nice if it were as simple to get an ebeling site up and running as creating an instance of a container or something.
I'd love to have an Ebeling site on a flash drive that you could plug in and work on locally and then sync to a remote server to publish (utilizing git ideally). I'd feel good about that.
I see it as a publishing platform, and also a local writing / note-taking / presentation app too. I want someone with unreliable internet access to be able to maintain an ebeling site and sync it when possible. That's the potential I see, a few of the billions of people who can't or don't want to use a centralized service with a monthly fee. How is someone supposed to pay for a WordPress site if they live in a part of the world where $30 USD a month is a significant portion of avg income?
I can also see rewriting it as a JavaScript app. I know JS well enough to do that. I also think JS is stable enough now to justify the effort. Having said that there's no real reason to do it. Perl is perfectly fine and in a lot of ways I think the perfect platform. I'll take Perl's regular expression support over JavaScript's for one thing, and you can get far with regular expressions for what ebeling needs to do.
Beyond all of that, I'd also like to teach people how to use it, or use it as a platform to teach web development. I've started doing a little teaching, and I've put together hundreds of pages of notes covering the fundamentals of web design and development.
I see it all as the same effort. It's my futile attempt to push back against the current state of the internet, in a constructive way.
There also needs to be some work done on the default theme. I can do that too. It's just a matter of time (and daily motivation).
It's not a big deal to show all 2000+ posts in an Ode site at once: http://updates.stevenrosenberg.net/?first_post=1&num_posts=all
Took about 11 seconds on my end for the 4.7MB of HTML, about 250K of images and 1.6MB of JavaScript
I'm really trying to simplify the default theme. I don't care if it's fancy. I want it to work as a baseline without modification and then I want to make it as simple as possible to modify. Take primary navigation for a moment. It was more complicated but also more fragile. Now it's incredibly basic and a few additional rulesets and a little JS from now it will be better off for it. Want to include dozens of links? Go ahead.
There's a version running at ode.io now. I could be handling this testing much more elegantly of course. For example (as you may know) rather than having the new theme be the default, I could just rename it and then explicitly request the working theme as part of the URL. But I figure this is my prerogative for having an exceedingly unpopular project. :)
Ummm… The responsive styles are essentially broken at the moment because I've been renaming things. Currently only the "marquee" is intact. (That's the bit at the top that reads "A platform about you*"). If you'd like to see some of the additional styles I'm including for content (again, very basic) you I have a playground post here: https://ode.io/playground/testing-2_shy.html#testing-2_shy. (Shy posts are only visible when explicitly requested.)
This is with:body {
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
max-width: 900px;
}
This is a crazy hacky solution. My CSS is trial/mostly error, so I'm sure there's a better way to do this). The original looks great on mobile and tablet; I'm just worried that the text is too wide for desktop and laptop reading.
