Some days, everything seems to go my way. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, but that stuff doesn’t even bother me. I’m comfortably hiding from all of that glare in my cool and dark house with my computer. Not to say that just being inside and programming would be my best day ever, which in my imagination would go something like this:
<NIGHT. EXTERIOR. ALL OF THE DAILY KOS USERS ARE AT A PICNIC NEXT TO A GRAVEYARD. THE DEAD CRAWL OUT OF THEIR GRAVES AND INTO THE PICNIC AREA.>
Zombie: I AM AN INTERNET ZOMBIE
Iterology: Stay back, good people
Zombie: BLAGH BRAINS URGG TRUMP
Iterology: Now see here, you—
Zombie: BLAH VOTE FOR TRUMP YOU MAY AS WELL
Iterology: —you, I don’t just know where the banhammers are. I don’t just have a banhammer in my hand. I work in the factory where we make banhammers, and we won’t be afraid to use them on the likes of you.
<THE PEOPLE ARE INSPIRED AND RUSH FORWARD AT THE ZOMBIES WITH THEIR BANHAMMERS>
Iterology: <HOLDS UP A HAND AND EVERYONE STOPS> But violence is never justified, even if it is in a metaphor inside my own daydream. I will now reason with the zombie and prove to it that it is wrong.
Zombie: TRUMP IS A DANGEROUSLY UNQUALIFIED, INCREDIBLY RACIST MORON WHO MIGHT END OUR DEMOCRACY AND POSSIBLY THE WORLD. WTF WAS I THINKING?
Iterology: I have won an argument on the internet
In reality, a good day as a programmer is a bit more mundane. Here’s a big accomplishment from one day last week that I am actually proud of, even though it seems super trivial. I changed a line of code that was something like
this.allowRecommend = true;
to something like
_this.allowRecommend = true;
Which fixed a bug! While before this fix you certainly could recommend and then unrecommend a comment, you would then have to reload the page be able to recommend it again afterwards. (You are supposed to be able to recommend and unrecommend a comment as often as you please, even, in Elfling’s words, “like a little monkey with a rabid pointing banana.”1) That little underscore lets you rec and unrec a comment all night long and tomorrow too.
On to the changes! I’m pretty proud of what we accomplished in the last two weeks, considering, as I said last time, we’ve been pretty shorthanded.
Changelog
- Readded the ability to opt in to the email list when signing up for Daily Kos or buying a subscription (it had been turned off because reasons)
- Fixed a problem with the image library where the new images would not be searchable for some time after uploading them (which was a big problem for anyone sharing images with other writers)
- This fix also seems to have perked up our search page (I don’t have any benchmarks to prove this, but it sure feels like it’s working better)
- Fixed a bug in which the popover with the list of users who had recommended a comment could be hidden by the top bar on the single comment view
- Fixed a bug in which comments could be recommended and unrecommended only once without reloading the page. Comments can now correctly be recced and unrecced as many times as you like (aka the rabid banana monkey fix)
- Added a spinner when recommending a comment to make it clear that the rec is in process
- Fixed a bug in which sometimes the “open in new tab” popover (for links) in the editor would not close (and if you should find one that does misbehave, making a change anywhere in the editor will now close it).
- New route for elections digest signup (https://www.dailykos.com/electionsdigest)
- Fixed the bug where a story could fail to save because the headline is too long. It should be impossible to enter a too-long headline now
Last time we lamented the passing of our friend the orange squiggle (aka the fleur-de-kos). That got me thinking about the icons and symbols that we do use in DK5. We’ll take a deeper dive into some site iconography and hidden features after the commercial break.
Mmmm, delicious hamburger menu
A LETTER ON A DUSTY BOXCAR WALl
Just as the homeless migratory workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had secret symbols they would etch into fence posts to help the next traveller along the way, the internet seems to have developed its own arcane code that replaces words with symbols. You’ve probably seen the “hamburger menu,” for example, which although it does not have actually offer any secret sauce or all-beef patties, often opens a sliding drawer to reveal the hidden menu for a website. (Thank goodness we don’t have one of those at Daily Kos, it’d send me packing back to Seattle and good ol’ Dick’s burgers.)
But although we here have little in the way of unholy iconography, there are a some symbols and features on DK that were mysterious even to me up until recently, so I thought it might be fun to do an overview of some of my favorite “hidden” features and icons. If you have any neat tricks I missed please post them in the comments! We’ll start easy and work our way up.
You open the navbar and find a +3 lead balloon of replying
THE SPEECH BUBBLE OF IMPENETRABLE INKINESS
OK, if your uid is 7 digits or less, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this one. This icon is neither, as I first thought, a lead balloon nor alien space ship with a death ray2. It is a speech bubble— but an opaque one. The symbolism is clear: someone is speaking to you, their words hidden, their voice distant. Your fortune, if you click this mysterious icon:
I sense you will soon read your recent comment replies.
Even though you might not have any recent comment replies. I never do, but I find it useful because it brings me one step closer to my comments, which I read over and over to admire my own brilliance and wonder why no one has recommended them.
The magic lead reply balloon used to have a little orange dot that would tell you when you did have a reply. We had to take that orange dot away because it got tired. I’m sure it will be back when it’s feeling rested.
That mail icon does what you think it does. I have exactly one piece of Kos Mail from 2012 I treasure because I never get any of those either3.
THE LINKS THAT MOSTLY WORK
The circled text, those are actually links
I actually put these links in and I forgot all about them, so I thought these were worth a mention even though that they aren’t icons at all. You know those nifty collapsing sidebars? The words on the top of the sidebar are also links to the recent, community spotlight, and recommended blogs. Who knew? I did, apparently, at one point.
“Most shared” doesn’t link to a blog because there is no “most shared” blog. In fact, that link doesn’t go anywhere at all. If you click on it, imagine me making a very sad trombone sound and you’ll still find that the experience is pleasurable.
THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THREE LINES THAT WERE NOT A HAMBURGER
Exhibit 1A for the prosecution, the top of my blog page
The great Belgian detective had gathered all of the suspects around a computer, conspicuously open to a Daily Kos blog page.
“You must have committed ze crime,” the detective said, pointing to the Colonel.
“I never did!” said Colonel Panic. “I had simply visited this page to open this hamburger menu.”
“Aha, and zat is precisely your mistake! Zat is not a hamburger menu!”
“What? It has three lines, it must be,” said Colonel Panic, his red face beginning to sweat.
“No! It is clearly an indicator that if you click zese lines, you will be taken to ze list view of the blog!”
“But then why is it active?” the Colonel asked, grasping for a way out.
“It is not active! It is colored orrange to show that you may click on it!”
“I knew that,” said the Colonel, mopping his brow. “I had seen the icon reversed on the page that it links to, with the blog view icon on the right colored orange.”
“But you could not have seen zat! They have not built that page in DK5 yet, so there is no icon like that with the right one colored orrange. Police, you may now take zis criminal away.”
Don’t be like Colonel Panic and wind up in a Belgian prison. Use the non-hamburger three lines icon to go to the list view of a blog instead.
THE HORRIBLE EYEBALL OF UNSPEAKABLE KNOWLEDGE
The eyeball reveals all, but maybe you don’t want it revealed
There are some things so horrible that people were not meant to know them. In the old days, that knowledge was hidden away in dusty tomes bound from unspeakable materials. But these days, to learn the horrible truth about the universe, you often don’t have to go farther the comments section of a random article on a website.
Luckily we have a strong moderation system and many of the worst comments are quickly hidden from view. If you are a trusted user, you have the ability to change your comment settings to see these hidden comments (and if you don’t have the ability to see hidden comments, just trust me that this really is not that great a feature to have).
The hidden comments, even when you have the ability to see them, are actually pretty hard to read. But click on the spooky eyeball, and the comment will be there plain as day and easy to read. Oh. Quick, click the eyeball again! Make it stop!
That’s it for this edition! Things might be slower for me for a bit, as I’m off to the Kate Wolf music festival next week (to see, among others, Eilen Jewell, featured below). Until next time! Leave a comment about matters technical or not, and I’ll write you a letter on a dusty boxcar wall.
Footnotes:
1. I’m not sure how a banana can be rabid either. Just go with it.
2. I watched “Independence Day” yesterday with my 11-year-old because I enjoyed it 20 years ago and thought it was my fatherly duty to watch it with him, and also, a sequel is coming out next weekend. Surprisingly, I was not high 20 years ago when I somehow enjoyed this movie, although I really wish I had been for this viewing. How in the name of the void does Will Smith find Vivica Fox in the completely ruined city of Los Angeles in like 20 minutes?
Also, if I had a time machine I would use it to stop Adam Baldwin from being cast in any science fiction films or TV shows, period, because that guy is a level 20 dickhead. He can still star in “My Bodyguard” for all I care because I haven’t even seen that movie.
3. Oh, Scoop. I’ll never forget the day you emailed me to say I had TU status. Now you never write, you never call.
(Special thanks to Peregrine Kate for editorial help and feedback)
