#gagsproject — Public Fediverse posts

it seems like #GAGSProject isn’t getting used very often at all, so I’ve been thinking about cancelling the VPS to save myself some money every month. I don’t really have that much income so it would be helpful to spend a little less

I would still keep the source code available on GitLab, and I might even share my server configs if anyone is interested in hosting their own version. but cancelling the VPS would mean that you can’t use GAGS anymore without hosting it yourself

I just wanted to mention this in case someone wants to talk me out of it or has a good alternative for me

it seems like #GAGSProject isn’t getting used very often at all, so I’ve been thinking about cancelling the VPS to save myself some money every month. I don’t really have that much income so it would be helpful to spend a little less

I would still keep the source code available on GitLab, and I might even share my server configs if anyone is interested in hosting their own version. but cancelling the VPS would mean that you can’t use GAGS anymore without hosting it yourself

I just wanted to mention this in case someone wants to talk me out of it or has a good alternative for me

wow I’m actually running out of ideas for features or improvements for #GAGSProject? I just did a few minor things (switched to uvicorn instead of gunicorn, and now links can be purple after you visit them, but only in circumstances where that won’t have potentially inconsistent behavior) and now the only two things left to do - as far as I can tell - are:

• fix and simplify some messy JS (a friend is working on this for me)
• make it look less terrible on a phone browser - especially when zooming. this is going to require me to figure out a lot of CSS Bullshit so I’ve been putting it off

and anyway after that I genuinely can’t think of anything else to add

wow I’m actually running out of ideas for features or improvements for #GAGSProject? I just did a few minor things (switched to uvicorn instead of gunicorn, and now links can be purple after you visit them, but only in circumstances where that won’t have potentially inconsistent behavior) and now the only two things left to do - as far as I can tell - are:

• fix and simplify some messy JS (a friend is working on this for me)
• make it look less terrible on a phone browser - especially when zooming. this is going to require me to figure out a lot of CSS Bullshit so I’ve been putting it off

and anyway after that I genuinely can’t think of anything else to add

alright the lazy-loading update for #GAGSProject is live! you should now be able to see way more results for every search. unfortunately depending on how restrictive your gender preferences are, searches could actually take longer now - possibly even much longer - but I hope that the tradeoff of waiting longer for more results ends up being something that others like

alright the lazy-loading update for #GAGSProject is live! you should now be able to see way more results for every search. unfortunately depending on how restrictive your gender preferences are, searches could actually take longer now - possibly even much longer - but I hope that the tradeoff of waiting longer for more results ends up being something that others like

omg so apparently if you search for nothing (as in, the empty string) using the reddit API, it will give you no results at all. instead of, y’know, a list of posts sorted by new or hot or something. I had no idea about this, so you would think that if you search for nothing in #GAGSProject then you will mysteriously get no results and think (kinda correctly) that GAGS is broken

but actually no - because a totally unrelated bug was making it so that searching for nothing on GAGS was actually searching for NOT (), which was tricking reddit into returning results anyway

I only found out about the first bug because today I fixed the second. so as a temporary workaround I’m deliberately keeping the second bug for now lol (but only for the very specific circumstances where reddit will return nothing)

omg so apparently if you search for nothing (as in, the empty string) using the reddit API, it will give you no results at all. instead of, y’know, a list of posts sorted by new or hot or something. I had no idea about this, so you would think that if you search for nothing in #GAGSProject then you will mysteriously get no results and think (kinda correctly) that GAGS is broken

but actually no - because a totally unrelated bug was making it so that searching for nothing on GAGS was actually searching for NOT (), which was tricking reddit into returning results anyway

I only found out about the first bug because today I fixed the second. so as a temporary workaround I’m deliberately keeping the second bug for now lol (but only for the very specific circumstances where reddit will return nothing)

this is a bit of a minor update but I added two new subreddits to #GAGSProject! r/GWAQueer and r/GoneWildAudioGay

in order to make room for them in the search results UI, I switched from using tabs to a navbar. I think I like this approach more because it communicates information explicitly that I was trying to communicate implicitly in the past - although this navbar format might be a little less intuitive to folks who are used to the UI language of tabs

also, I added a new button that lets you save your gender preferences and blacklist. in the past whenever you submitted a search, your preferences would be saved, but there was no way to save them without submitting a search

this is a bit of a minor update but I added two new subreddits to #GAGSProject! r/GWAQueer and r/GoneWildAudioGay

in order to make room for them in the search results UI, I switched from using tabs to a navbar. I think I like this approach more because it communicates information explicitly that I was trying to communicate implicitly in the past - although this navbar format might be a little less intuitive to folks who are used to the UI language of tabs

also, I added a new button that lets you save your gender preferences and blacklist. in the past whenever you submitted a search, your preferences would be saved, but there was no way to save them without submitting a search

I just pushed my experimental changes to production at 6am because I make bad decisions

but, everything seems to be working! #GAGSProject is now fully async. it doesn’t have lazy-loading yet but at least the whole server doesn’t grind to a halt while it’s waiting on the results of just one reddit API request

I just pushed my experimental changes to production at 6am because I make bad decisions

but, everything seems to be working! #GAGSProject is now fully async. it doesn’t have lazy-loading yet but at least the whole server doesn’t grind to a halt while it’s waiting on the results of just one reddit API request

alright I now have an experimental version of #GAGSProject that uses FastAPI instead of Flask! every feature seems to work exactly the same, except now everything runs asynchronously (finally! T_T) and probably faster?

before I switch over to this version in production, though, I want to tweak one more thing: I want to lazy-load the results of people’s searches, instead of fetching all of the results at once. that way y’all can browse thousands of results if you want to - instead of being capped to just 100 - and that won’t slow the server down at all

after I’m done with this, I’m actually thinking about posting about GAGS on certain subreddits where I feel like people might appreciate the ability to search by gender (like r/GWASapphic and r/GoneWildAudioTrans)

alright I now have an experimental version of #GAGSProject that uses FastAPI instead of Flask! every feature seems to work exactly the same, except now everything runs asynchronously (finally! T_T) and probably faster?

before I switch over to this version in production, though, I want to tweak one more thing: I want to lazy-load the results of people’s searches, instead of fetching all of the results at once. that way y’all can browse thousands of results if you want to - instead of being capped to just 100 - and that won’t slow the server down at all

after I’m done with this, I’m actually thinking about posting about GAGS on certain subreddits where I feel like people might appreciate the ability to search by gender (like r/GWASapphic and r/GoneWildAudioTrans)

example #GAGSProject error page

example #GAGSProject error page

anyway I’m still working on getting #GAGSProject ported to FastAPI but FastAPI actually has some really nice error-checking features for request parameters so I’ve been sidetracked (in a way that I’m enjoying) on adding some user-friendly error pages to GAGS

anyway I’m still working on getting #GAGSProject ported to FastAPI but FastAPI actually has some really nice error-checking features for request parameters so I’ve been sidetracked (in a way that I’m enjoying) on adding some user-friendly error pages to GAGS

I fucking love that you can just, put an entire JavaScript script, complete with comments, inside of an HTML <button> element and nothing will break. it will work exactly as you would expect and want it to

I’m trying to minimize JS as much as possible in #GAGSProject but I now have a button that lets you copy debug info from an error page to your clipboard to help me figure out if something is breaking, and I needed JS for that. and thankfully it was only a few lines

I fucking love that you can just, put an entire JavaScript script, complete with comments, inside of an HTML <button> element and nothing will break. it will work exactly as you would expect and want it to

I’m trying to minimize JS as much as possible in #GAGSProject but I now have a button that lets you copy debug info from an error page to your clipboard to help me figure out if something is breaking, and I needed JS for that. and thankfully it was only a few lines

ugghh I just learned that #GAGSProject has not been running as async as I thought it was. while it’s rendering the results for one user’s request, the whole server grinds to a halt and it ignores any other requests, despite the fact that everything is technically async (at least, I’m pretty sure this is what’s happening)

I think there’s some weird nuance to how Flask handles async that’s breaking it. I have no idea what that nuance might be though, so I’m probably just going to rewrite my code to use FastAPI instead and hope that that fixes it :/

ugghh I just learned that #GAGSProject has not been running as async as I thought it was. while it’s rendering the results for one user’s request, the whole server grinds to a halt and it ignores any other requests, despite the fact that everything is technically async (at least, I’m pretty sure this is what’s happening)

I think there’s some weird nuance to how Flask handles async that’s breaking it. I have no idea what that nuance might be though, so I’m probably just going to rewrite my code to use FastAPI instead and hope that that fixes it :/

I just made a few improvements to #GAGSProject! they’re really just small UI things to hopefully make it clearer how GAGS works - like how to find the blacklist textbox and what the tabs in the search results do

my next project is going to be much bigger though: currently GAGS will only fetch the first 100 results when you search for something, because it has to fetch all of the results right away and that’s really slow (this is before it does the gender filtering btw)

but, I think there might be a way for me to lazily fetch results as you click “next page” instead. I have two different ideas for how to do this and I’m going to see if I can make either of them work. if so, GAGS should theoretically be able to fetch as many results as you want and it shouldn’t even be any slower than its current behavior

I just made a few improvements to #GAGSProject! they’re really just small UI things to hopefully make it clearer how GAGS works - like how to find the blacklist textbox and what the tabs in the search results do

my next project is going to be much bigger though: currently GAGS will only fetch the first 100 results when you search for something, because it has to fetch all of the results right away and that’s really slow (this is before it does the gender filtering btw)

but, I think there might be a way for me to lazily fetch results as you click “next page” instead. I have two different ideas for how to do this and I’m going to see if I can make either of them work. if so, GAGS should theoretically be able to fetch as many results as you want and it shouldn’t even be any slower than its current behavior

administrating a Linux server is worse than CSS and JS combined :BlobCat_Googly_NotLikeThis:

related, but I’ve been having DNS issues with duckdns and others have been reporting the same, so you can now also access #GAGSProject through https://gags-search.xyz/

so if you’re having problems with https://gags-search.duckdns.org/ , try using the new URL instead. it should be faster and better

administrating a Linux server is worse than CSS and JS combined :BlobCat_Googly_NotLikeThis:

related, but I’ve been having DNS issues with duckdns and others have been reporting the same, so you can now also access #GAGSProject through https://gags-search.xyz/

so if you’re having problems with https://gags-search.duckdns.org/ , try using the new URL instead. it should be faster and better

also! #GAGSProject now has a favicon and I think it turned out so good!

CW: it’s a pixelated ball gag that I traced in GIMP

also! #GAGSProject now has a favicon and I think it turned out so good!

CW: it’s a pixelated ball gag that I traced in GIMP

holy crap my #GAGSProject VPS has barely been up for two days and I’ve never publicly shared the address and yet it’s been hit by so many different vulnerability scanners

I just set up fail2ban which will hopefully get them to leave me alone

also I’m almost ready to open up GAGS for everyone to use! I just want to have some of my friends check it for security issues first

holy crap my #GAGSProject VPS has barely been up for two days and I’ve never publicly shared the address and yet it’s been hit by so many different vulnerability scanners

I just set up fail2ban which will hopefully get them to leave me alone

also I’m almost ready to open up GAGS for everyone to use! I just want to have some of my friends check it for security issues first

I just learned about Atkinson Hyperlegible, which is a free font that’s meant to be more readable for low-vision users. I also just really like how it looks and I think it’s clearer and easier for me to read, too, as someone with decent enough vision

this is definitely going to be the new font for #GAGSProject

I just learned about Atkinson Hyperlegible, which is a free font that’s meant to be more readable for low-vision users. I also just really like how it looks and I think it’s clearer and easier for me to read, too, as someone with decent enough vision

this is definitely going to be the new font for #GAGSProject

hmm okay so I almost have everything that I need in order to host #GAGSProject for everyone to use… except for one problem that I just can not figure out

for some reason if I try to use async #PRAW on PythonAnywhere, it fails with an error saying that it can’t connect to #reddit. but if I use regular PRAW, it works completely fine

on my own computer, both async PRAW and regular PRAW work and so does all of my GAGS code. so I have no idea what’s different about PythonAnywhere that’s causing this problem

unfortunately I basically have to use async PRAW in my code because the alternative would be that every single search would freeze my entire webapp for like 1-2 seconds, which would make it an unresponsive mess if more than one user was searching at a time

hmm okay so I almost have everything that I need in order to host #GAGSProject for everyone to use… except for one problem that I just can not figure out

for some reason if I try to use async #PRAW on PythonAnywhere, it fails with an error saying that it can’t connect to #reddit. but if I use regular PRAW, it works completely fine

on my own computer, both async PRAW and regular PRAW work and so does all of my GAGS code. so I have no idea what’s different about PythonAnywhere that’s causing this problem

unfortunately I basically have to use async PRAW in my code because the alternative would be that every single search would freeze my entire webapp for like 1-2 seconds, which would make it an unresponsive mess if more than one user was searching at a time

I want a UI framework that will let me make #GAGSProject look like this

I want a UI framework that will let me make #GAGSProject look like this

I am so fucking impatient for reddit to approve #GAGSProject already ughh. I genuinely can’t think of anything to add to it at this point? other than stuff that I really don’t have the energy for like testing it with a screen-reader or rewriting it to use Bulma

(which, tbh I don’t think that Bulma has the visual vocabulary for some of the stuff that I’m doing. I’m not actually sure how you’re supposed to use Bulma to make a UI that has sections within sections that you want to visually separate, for example. and Bulma’s card component seems like the best place for me to put a GWA post but it’s also so flashy and attention-grabbing and I feel like having 25 of them back-to-back on a page would look absolutely terrible lol)

I am so fucking impatient for reddit to approve #GAGSProject already ughh. I genuinely can’t think of anything to add to it at this point? other than stuff that I really don’t have the energy for like testing it with a screen-reader or rewriting it to use Bulma

(which, tbh I don’t think that Bulma has the visual vocabulary for some of the stuff that I’m doing. I’m not actually sure how you’re supposed to use Bulma to make a UI that has sections within sections that you want to visually separate, for example. and Bulma’s card component seems like the best place for me to put a GWA post but it’s also so flashy and attention-grabbing and I feel like having 25 of them back-to-back on a page would look absolutely terrible lol)

okay so apparently the way that people make UIs in HTML is not to write all of the CSS by hand (which is a fucking nightmare!) but to use a UI “framework”

some of them look hideously overengineered (like MUI and Bootstrap) and require not just JavaScript but also React for some (hopefully good?) reason. but others are literally just CSS files that you include and they handle all of the fiddly bullshit involved in making a webpage be Actually Usable

so while I’m waiting for reddit to decide if I’m allowed to host my website, I’m thinking of switching to one of those which will hopefully make it much easier to add new UI stuff to #GAGSProject. the downside is that it’s going to make GAGS look like it was made by fucking techbros, (look at this website and tell me it doesn’t make you feel instantly uncomfortable) so I’m going to have to see if I can tolerate that before I fully commit to using one of these 😅

okay so apparently the way that people make UIs in HTML is not to write all of the CSS by hand (which is a fucking nightmare!) but to use a UI “framework”

some of them look hideously overengineered (like MUI and Bootstrap) and require not just JavaScript but also React for some (hopefully good?) reason. but others are literally just CSS files that you include and they handle all of the fiddly bullshit involved in making a webpage be Actually Usable

so while I’m waiting for reddit to decide if I’m allowed to host my website, I’m thinking of switching to one of those which will hopefully make it much easier to add new UI stuff to #GAGSProject. the downside is that it’s going to make GAGS look like it was made by fucking techbros, (look at this website and tell me it doesn’t make you feel instantly uncomfortable) so I’m going to have to see if I can tolerate that before I fully commit to using one of these 😅

okay it’s looking like I might be able to host #GAGSProject for free with PythonAnywhere. but I need reddit to give me permission to host a website that uses their API, so I just submitted a request and hopefully they’ll approve it 🤞

okay it’s looking like I might be able to host #GAGSProject for free with PythonAnywhere. but I need reddit to give me permission to host a website that uses their API, so I just submitted a request and hopefully they’ll approve it 🤞

I think what I’m learning from #GAGSProject is that the answer to “how do I do HTML/CSS/JS in a way that is safe and sane without adding a bunch of magical black boxes?” is that “you can’t lol you need the black boxes to do that”

like I fucking hate React but I think I kinda understand why people use React now, because the alternative is to write code in 4 different languages and somehow make sure that they’re all meshing together exactly correctly

I think what I’m learning from #GAGSProject is that the answer to “how do I do HTML/CSS/JS in a way that is safe and sane without adding a bunch of magical black boxes?” is that “you can’t lol you need the black boxes to do that”

like I fucking hate React but I think I kinda understand why people use React now, because the alternative is to write code in 4 different languages and somehow make sure that they’re all meshing together exactly correctly

uggghh UI stuff is way too boring to be this difficult. I hate making UIs so much

but! #GAGSProject now automatically saves your gender preferences after every search, so you don’t have to enter them every time. I just need to do a few more things before I can consider hosting it somewhere for everyone to use. those things are:

• let the user set a blacklist
• automatically save the blacklist after every search
• I have to make a popup about following the reddit ToS :/
• get a reddit API key for the website

after that I’m pretty sure I can just start figuring out how to host it

uggghh UI stuff is way too boring to be this difficult. I hate making UIs so much

but! #GAGSProject now automatically saves your gender preferences after every search, so you don’t have to enter them every time. I just need to do a few more things before I can consider hosting it somewhere for everyone to use. those things are:

• let the user set a blacklist
• automatically save the blacklist after every search
• I have to make a popup about following the reddit ToS :/
• get a reddit API key for the website

after that I’m pretty sure I can just start figuring out how to host it