July 2024 Work Log

Hey everyone! Here's everything I worked on during the month of July, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

ImageShare

My ImageShare web app has gone through a lot of rewrites and upgrades over the past few years, in an effort to remain functional on the Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, and other legacy devices and browsers while minimizing hosting costs.

ImageShare was originally a simple PHP application running on Heroku, then was migrated to DigitalOcean Apps platform, then a custom PHP server configuration on a DigitalOcean VPS, and then finally a Docker container running on the VPS. The app initially used Imgur for image uploads, but later had to transition to ImgBB because Imgur started blocking API requests coming from the site.

Well, ImgBB is now rate-limiting API access from ImageShare. Here we go again.

I've been meaning to do it for a while, but now I really need to get rid of all third-party service dependencies in ImageShare. That means handling all image uploading and (temporary) hosting, instead of uploading to Imgur or ImgBB, and generating the QR code to scan, instead of using the goQR.me API. That should drastically improve reliability and long-term support, and also make self-hosting ImageShare easier and more practical.

This month I started working on a rewritten version of ImageShare, using Node.js, TypeScript, and Express instead of PHP. My hope is that a Node.js codebase will be more manageable, and will make features like image uploading and QR code generation easier to handle.

I have an initial version of this working now, with image uploads handled by the server and deleted automatically after two minutes. I also want to try implementing a detailed preview page that appears when the QR code is scanned, instead of just the raw image file.

I'm not 100% sure if the Node version will work out, but so far it's going well. Stay tuned!

The Spacebar

I wrote two articles on The Spacebar this month:

• How to install yt-dlp on Windows, Mac, and Linux

• What is Firefox supposed to do?

The yt-dlp guide was split off from a larger article I'm working on about yt-dlp/youtube-dl, I'm hoping to have that done next month. As a reminder, you can follow The Spacebar on Mastodon, RSS, email, and Google News.