antennapedia

I have no joke here. I just like saying "spate". Spate spate spate.

Home sick again today. It’s the flu, or something like it, because I was running a fever of 100F last night. Uncool, particularly because I got the flu shot this year for the first time ever. It should at least have the good grace to immunize me against something. But I read that this year’s shot is effective against only 60% of the strains or something like that. So the first year I get the flu shot is also the first year I get the flu.

I have been pounding orange juice and napping frequently.

Today, if I can function, I am going to write client-side javascript for interviewing somebody posting fic. Hmm, I should untangle that sentence. Posting fic is answering a series of questions, aka being interviewed. This process is most visible in the ff.net posting sequence, which makes you choose a category & fandom from by answering questions, then presents a fandom-specific form to fill out. The ff.net experience is a very web 1.0 experience, with page loads between each question. The AO3 fic posting experience is more modern, in the sense that it is tag-driven for every single damn piece of fic information, but web 2.0 at best because it uses javascript sparingly. It does not present any fandom-specific interaction; the interface does not change interactively.

I think that lack is most evident with the no warnings/has warnings/choose not to warn segment. Really what you want is to make people choose one of those three, and then if there are warnings, pick the ones that apply. But the AO3 just makes them all a bunch of checkboxes with no constraints, so you can pick “no archive warnings apply” plus “major character death”. Uh… One way to avoid this silliness is to present different interface if the question has been answered one way versus another. Browser-side javascript, in other words. In this case, simple DOM manipulation that any jquery jockey could do.

I did some work with backbone.js last year at this time, got frustrated with backbone, then wrote my own model class with a slightly different feature set. I might use backbone plus plugins like Synapse this time because I’m not sure I want to invest the time into writing my own framework. The problem is that backbone is a library not a framework, and what you want is a framework to avoid fucktons of boilerplate.

Yeah, that was a lot of jargon, sorry. I’m really deep-ending in the world of javascript thanks to my job. I am going to both nodeconf and jsconf this year.

I had this realization the other day that media categories like “is a book fandom” vs “is a movie fandom” are just utterly meaningless to me. They’re completely artificial divisions of the material that don’t belong foregrounded as browisng categories. Search and autocompletion should be how you find a fandom from your starting point at the top of the archive. You should just start typing a fandom name and get a list of possibilities.

I have many strong opinions.