Full time work - month 2
Published on January 9, 2024 by yayuyokitano
Hi again!
As you may have already seen we have once again reached close to 1500 dollars, allowing for another month of full time work. I intend to start this today/tomorrow, on the 10th of January, working until friday 9th of February. This will definitely be my last stint of full-time work, as after this there will be very little time left for me to be available. That said, as mentioned before there are some ideas on how to use our funds in a good way in the future as well that we will get into at a later time. (beyond the constant ~$70-80 annual cost of upkeep)
The terms of work will be the same as the last month, except that this month, I intend to cut down the number of emails sent out to one mid-month email, and one end-of-month email, with more frequent reports being put on discord. However, these emails will still be written to be standalone progression reports, with no need to check in on discord. I mostly just want to spare your inboxes a bit😊
As you may have already seen we have once again reached close to 1500 dollars, allowing for another month of full time work. I intend to start this today/tomorrow, on the 10th of January, working until friday 9th of February. This will definitely be my last stint of full-time work, as after this there will be very little time left for me to be available. That said, as mentioned before there are some ideas on how to use our funds in a good way in the future as well that we will get into at a later time. (beyond the constant ~$70-80 annual cost of upkeep)
The terms of work will be the same as the last month, except that this month, I intend to cut down the number of emails sent out to one mid-month email, and one end-of-month email, with more frequent reports being put on discord. However, these emails will still be written to be standalone progression reports, with no need to check in on discord. I mostly just want to spare your inboxes a bit😊
Current Status
Most things written between september and october are now implemented and pushed in versions 3.3.0 and 3.4.0. However, I had extremely little time to dedicate to the project for the past couple of months for a lot of personal reasons, and that has unfortunately manifested in not everything being out yet (despite the code technically being complete save for reviews and testing). This is on me, and I apologize.
Currently, four changes implemented during september/october are not in production:
Currently, four changes implemented during september/october are not in production:
- Ability to block specific channels on youtube (and potentially other websites): Merged, will release with next version of web scrobbler.
- Ability to block specific tags from scrobbling, scrobble cache, and rich presence: Under review, but all pretty close to done now. Tag blocking is ready to merge, rich presence has one small PR left to merge + a tiny bit of cross platform testing before release, scrobble cache has a tiny bit more work to go in terms of testing and updating.
These changes (except for rich presence) are changes that affect the very core of how the extension operates, hence bugs in these new functionalities can manifest in, in the worst case, completely breaking the extension (see version 3.0.0, which was extremely stressful, and demanded tens of hours of work throughout night and day to create several hotfixes). Because of this, we are trying to make sure the features ship without any regressions.
We will probably release all of this throughout the first week or two of this full-time stint, to have me available to patch any issues that may occur.
What's to Come
We have a set of goals set up for the coming month. These are more things in number than last month, but they are generally not as fundamental or big changes as were introduced the last full-time month.
- Update from vite 4 to vite 5 - this is just a thing that has to be done. The upgrade should be pretty simple and only take a couple hours at most.
- Rework Connector.isScrobblingAllowed to allow us to narrow down the reason why a scrobble is being disallowed for the user to improve user feedback. (probably 1-2 days)
- Add connector detection through other means than URL, such as detecting bandcamp using DOM (1-2 days)
- Add an option to advanced settings to disable web scrobblers guessing of album names (<1 day)
- Use tab.audible API to detect isPlaying as the default instead of assuming true all the time as default. I am not sure if it is realistic for this to be implemented yet, but if it is it shouldn't take very long.
- Add a liked/not liked selector so that when the user likes a song on for instance youtube or spotify, it will also be liked on their scrobbling service (should be disableable in advanced settings) (~2 days)
- Add a menu to the infobox (currently only implemented in youtube connector) that allows the user to do some relevant actions such as skipping, editing, or, well, disabling the infobox (2-3 days)
- Improve accessibility (probably 3-5 days but this one is pretty unpredictable IMO)
- high contrast theme
- general keyboard navigation improvements
- screen reader usage improvements
- Troubleshoot bugs, in particular a pesky bug that is causing a small subset of firefox users to be unable to log in. (completely unknown how long this will take, fix is probably just a couple of lines)
- Implement a stricter timeout for non-necessary requests to keep web scrobbler working relatively smoothly if for instance musicbrainz goes down (should be very fast)
- Add a connector attribute that notifies users that the site has its own scrobbling system on first visit (for instance spotify) (<1 day)
- Indicate whether a song is playing or paused using the extension icon (1-2 days)
Despite the list being long, I am relatively confident that this should all be comfortably doable within a month since each item is generally smaller. Additionally, some time will be spent in the beginning of the month continuing to make the last preparations to ship previous features, and patching up any issues that may occur. Additionally, there will be PR reviewing of other PRs, some that have been left unmerged for too long, some more work on documentation, and of course going through issues and such.
If there is more time remaining at the end of the month (I think there will be), the remaining time would most likely go to connector development. The backlog of connector requests leaves more than enough to work on. If there is a lot of time remaining, we may look into potentially making a simple UI editor for creating simpler connectors. However, this would take a long time, and may be more work and maintenance than it is worth, so this is not something that is decided quite yet.
As always, if you see something that you think we have missed or that you just selfishly want (thats totally ok!), let us know either by replying to this or by sending a message on discord or however else you want to reach us or me, the list is not set in stone!
Thank you all for your support, and I will do my best over the coming month!
👍️ 1
yayuyokitano
Posted on January 9, 2024
Adding more options to regex edits! (case insensitive, matches that aren't matching the full string)