I did not mean to spend a whole week just on the captcha, but here we are. Using a combination of an open source captcha library, linux text-to-speach software and ffmpeg, I'm fairly confidant that I've struck a good balance between usability and bot-squashing. I want to get this in front of actual humans to test asap.

Building captchas is the most cpu-intensive part of gart so far so i'm having to spend extra time making the rate-limiting mechanism more robust.

In other news I managed to get a small webdesign contract that will keep me indoors for another month so that's fantastic, but that also means i'll have to scale back work on gart for at least a week.

Also, I realized I was reindexing the devblog posts every time i ran the static site generator, so the newest post was always 0.html. That's fixed now.

Thanks again for stopping by!

~Sofie ❤️

Good news! I made more progress than i thought i did!

So, I'm building this app with very loosely coupled- essentially independent- components that are tied together with a larger framework. Two of the earliest components I worked on were a thing that parses usertags, hashtags and links from a shortpost, and another that works as an image uploader, verifier and thumbnailer. And when I dug into infra stuff I was mid-way though marrying those components within the framework to create an actual functional microblogging service. Neato. Next up after that is threads and replies.

The other thing I was working on was a captcha. The easy way to do this is to generate a capcha and then assume its OK if ocrad fails to read it. This seems... inadequate. So I'm playing with the idea of doing an extra call to Textract to verify that the captcha is indeed very hard to read mechanically. But that is very, expensive. Both as an api call and financially.

What I'll probably end up doing is building the captcha images using some wierd old fonts I found on a 90's shareware disk. If it ends up being a problem I'll add utf8 codepoints. I'll have to build an emojii picker for that, but I'll eventually need one anyway. Absolute worst case scenario I'll switch to google captcha.

I'll also be working on user-account specific stuff like account visibility (public, protected, private), user and hashtag subscriptions, feeds, and content flagging.

Thanks again for stopping by. Please tell your friends about us and don't forget to DONATE for a beta invite.

~Sofie ❤️

Gart.gg is LIVE!

First of all a huge thanks to my early supporters. This literally wouldn't exist if it weren't for you.

So where are we? How's development going?

Well, It took much, much longer than I expected to get my custom Linux build working with my webhost. I'm used to working in vmware so some of this stuff is still new to me. But now that's done!

So that put me behind schedule, and I needed to get something out for the sake of my donors- so i spent a few more days building this static site generator!

I've now spent so long away from the core of the project that I can't come up with any near-term goals off the top of my head for this blog post so, I guess that's what my goal for today will be; A quick once over of my progress so far so i can come back and give a more complete update of where we are and where we're headed.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you're as excited about this as I am.

~Sofie ❤️