Alicornutopia

Would it be possible to get some kind of quick and dirty diff highlighting in the post/reply edit history? Would make the feature a lot more useful for figuring out what changed.

Marri, there is on nice way to do what Heroku wants you to do with the DNS. There are several not-so-nice ways to do it, and a few namesrevers will do them behind the scenes and present a nice clean summary. If add-ons don’t cost extra I would expect Heroku’s own PointDNS to be easiest to work with because you already use Heroku; if they do then I have no recommendation other than look at the ones they link to here and hope one of them looks good. You can almost certainly use any of them with Google domains.

Jalapeno, I’ve actually looked into this for other purposes, but not that recently. HTML diffing is more difficult than it sounds, but there’s probably some way to make a quick version as long as you don’t want it to highlight format changes. I agree it would be nice, though. A quick search turned up only one potentially useful result in either Ruby or Javascript, but I don’t know if that’s actually any good or if there are other ones. Failing any libraries for HTML diffing the best that can be done with a reasonable amount of effort is probably just a diff of the posts with all tags removed.

Shouldn't highlighting format changes be easier than not doing so? Can just diff the raw HTML as an ASCII sequence rather than having to parse it to figure out what's formatting vs. text.

That would also be possible, but I was imagining that most viewers of the page would rather not see the raw HTML.

Ah, I was imagining something like the way Wikipedia does it, where you can see the underlying source.

Hi from work laptop!

Terrible news: My home internet is not working. I expect this to be fixed by the time I get home, but last night was a Stressful Thing.

Bad news: Writing the (reasonably complex) scraper bumped us down to 57.95% code coverage, from 63.64%.

Good news: Since writing tests is about all I can do without internet, and also the number was stressing me out, and also-also Throne and I want to upgrade to Rails 4 at some point and having comprehensive tests first seems important: we're now at 61.64%. (I'd have just written tests for the damn scraper, but because the scraper makes HTTP calls to Dreamwidth I would need to install proper HTTP mocking in my tests, aaaaaand I can't install new gems without internet. So, tests for other things happened.)

So once I'm home and have internet, we shall have more tests. Whoo?

In other news: will make a To Do for diffing, though it is in fact weirdly difficult, and I will dig more into this domain stuff but for some reason my brain is interpreting the PointDNS stuff (which realistically I should use, it's Heroku and free) as 'point your Heroku domain to this url' rather than 'point your domain to this Heroku url' which seems weird and wrong. I'm pretty sure that's not right but I am tired and I will poke at it more later. (Daniel, you seem better at processing this, if you have advice I would much appreciate it.)

The PointDNS addon is free if you use only one domain and 10 or fewer records. (link) Adding it also looks straightforward.

Seems like, inconveniently, Heroku is having issues right now. So the Constellation is down? :\

Edit: Heroku (finally, like 40 minutes after the issue started for us) reenabled restarts, and a single one of those fixed it. So. It's back now.

I think you’re right about needing to point Heroku to the domain name as well as the domain name to Heroku. Both steps are separate and necessary, but it looks like Heroku tries to hide some of the complication and this is what made it look backwards.

It’s actually a three-step process. You need to tell your domain name to point to your nameservers (PointDNS probably), you need those nameservers to point to your Heroku site, and you need your Heroku site to know about the domain name. The reason you need to tell Heroku that glowfic.com is a valid way to get to the Constellation is that otherwise the browser will say “Host: glowfic.com” and the server will say that it has no clue what site it wants. If there were only one site on the server, this wouldn’t be a problem; as it is, you presumably get a shared server with multiple sites so the server needs to know how those sites correspond to domains.

So here are the three steps:

1. Tell your registrar that you would don’t like the DNS servers they provide and would like to use a different service’s (only necessary because Heroku needs your DNS servers to support a nonstandard feature most registrars don’t provide). I haven’t found what nameservers to use if you use PointDNS, but presumably once you provision it or log in or something it’ll say. Otherwise PointDNS can know that glowfic.com means to go to vast-journey-9935.herokuapp.com, but nobody will know to ask them.
2. Tell Heroku that you have the domain, and if anybody asks Heroku for the website at that domain then they should serve yours. Otherwise, Heroku will respond with a 404 saying that it doesn’t know what app you mean.
3. Tell your DNS servers to point to Heroku; when you use PointDNS, this step seems to be combined with the previous one, because they’re designed to work well together (I think this combination is the source of your confusion). Otherwise, of course, people going to glowfic.com won’t know that it can be found at Heroku.

UI issue: On the favorites page, there's no visual difference between threads you're caught up on and new, unopened threads.