#mystory
OTD in 2009:
I made my first announcement to my closest friends that I was #trans. It was on a social media site known as LiveJournal, which many of you have likely never heard of. I migrated off of that site years ago. You can see that post now on my blog at https://janetannelogan.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/announcement/ . It's no longer locked.
Barbara and I had discussed me making that post in advance, and she was supportive. This was my first attempt at transition. Then in August of 2009, she went back into the hospital, and I detransitioned to be able to care for her. Back then, we feared I wouldn't be able to be with her as Janet. After she passed in 2010, I grieved for a long time. Then I restarted transition and have lived as Janet since.
Since it’s close to Halloween, I decided to write a short story. Parts of this story may or may not be true, but what I have seen will be forever in my memory and lives within my dreams. It’s not a scary story, but it’s of a mysterious world local to this area and below us. I will not disclose the names or places. Some of you may have been there too.
My story begins nearly a few decades ago in 1993 on a pleasant autumn day here in Kansas City on a busy street. I was with someone I worked with and we were given an opportunity to remove the remaining retail display cases of a former major local electronics retailer for our project. For a small fee, we were given addresses, master keys, and alarm codes for the former superstores.
The stores still had the large brand name across the storefront for years after they locked the doors, much like we remember Blockbuster did. I don’t remember any “for sale” or lease signs in any of the stores. I assumed they are still privately owned properties of a wealthy family. Why is this important? We had to call them after we failed to disarm one of the alarm systems and faced the loud alarm horn. Apparently, someone in the family changed the alarm codes and walked us through how to disarm us.
They also invited us to check out the long stairs going down below the basement. They told us to grab the flashlights at the door, because there was no electricity beyond the bottom of the stairs. They asked us not to touch anything down there, but welcomed us to look around. And this is where the story begins.
We thought it would only take several minutes, but we were gone for a few hours and it seemed like a lifetime. There was a door at the bottom of the stairs, leading into a dark concrete tunnel that lead into caves and more tunnels. The first mile of the tunnels deep below the Kansas CIty streets lead through caves filled with old WWI supplies that appeared only several years old like we had gone back in time. We did not have cameras on us like we do today, but our experience will be with us forever. This is where the world begins.
But the tunnels never had an end. There were many deep into this underground world where others ages ago built communities and contributed to a rich treasure unlike anything seen on the surface above.
Several years later, I bought a house in southern Kansas CIty several miles away from the site. The house, like most others in Kansas City, had a room in the basement totally enclosed in concrete. The real estate agent explained they may be from the cold war era and serve as a shelter from a nuke. Some of us had converted these rooms into fully furnished entertainment rooms.
What I will never forget and what will always be with me is a section of crumbling wall that lead into the tunnels. This is where the story never ends. The tunnel would always call me and ask me to reach new places. After work many nights, I would travel further. This is where dreams and the real world become mixed. I would meet others and share a permanent bond in these tunnels. I sold the house a few years ago and it might even be on the market today as it’s been through a few owners. I guess the tunnels didn’t invite them as they left so early. But every time I close my eyes, the world below welcomes me again and shares its great treasures.
Have You Ever Pressed Share only to notice a mistake? Bummed because you'll have to redo all the markdown formatting? Boy Do I Have A #Tip For You | Or:
How I lost my shit reading the historical discussion around adding an edit feature to diaspora* and accidently stumbled across a fugly workaround to retrieve markdown formatting.
A story of agony (for the author or the reader? You decide)
The Problem with how we have to currently edit
aka: I seriously enjoy the current edit process. About as much as I enjoy fucking myself in my own face with a cinderblock.
When we are posting to diaspora, we all know what to do if we make an error/typo/word choice that we simply cannot live with.
A. We copy the text,
B. Delete the comment or post,
C. Start a new comment or post
D. And then mark it up all over again,
hoping not to make the same or new mistakes.
If it wasn't clear, I seriously enjoy this process. About as much as I enjoy fucking myself in my own face with a cinder block. So nice, I typed it twice.
So here it is, just the #tip
- Before you delete the offending post, get the permalink to the post
- and add
.jsonto the end of the URL - You will see a nasty looking blob of text but upon closer inspection, other than some HTML and other markup, nestled within one big quotation, you will find your post in all it's markdown glory (plus some characters to represent line breaks
/rand/nand the magic code for the>character [markdown forblockquote] that will need to be cleaned up.) - Copy your words along with the markdown formatting intact,
- Paste into a new post
- And clean up some of the rendering artifacts noted above and there you have it! A fresh start.
And a Kafkaesque editing process that feels like a late 90's problem ruining a perfectly AWESOME diaspora UX (otherwise).
Wondering how I stumbled across this tip?
Or what it has to do with anything else in this rambling nightmare of a story? Well - buckle upand prepared to be bored to death by my petty, nit picking reaction to what I perceive to be user experience (UX) hostility.
Seriously - there's lots of words below, but you don't want to go there. It's a dumpster fire smoldering in the shit show of my heart. Consider this your warning. Below you will find a WTAMFF and a I shit you not.
You will read an author full of incredulity, self righteous ire and a whole lot of puffed up attitudes about the import of his own opinion. Is it a spectacle worth your time? I don't know. You'll have to decide.
So I decided to start reading Feature proposal: Editing of posts
You know - the 7 year long discussion where developers wring their hands and knit their brows about how can they possibly control the end users from abusing an edit feature.
After reading more than I care to admit on this tiresome conversation that ended in a muddied proposal about diaspora lacking an edit post & edit comment feature, I came across the json tip.
In fact, one of the devs actually suggested the .json trick as a satisfactory method for users to edit (that is - copy the .json markup, delete the old post, redo the post, publish again) and therefore there was no need for edit features.
W T A M F F
^what^ ^the^ ^actual^ ^mother^ ^fucking^ ^fuck^
One of the devs actually asked:
Is it really a good and desirable thing, coding effort aside, to let people edit their historical comments at any time? I don’t think it is, for reasons I’ve outlined above ...
His reasons outlined "above" boiled down to the fact that people are children and can not be trusted.
That kind of end user hostility is unacceptable to me.
Another of the greatest hits from as recent as October 2017:
If you have any doubt, copy the raw markdown version of your post before submitting it.
The best way to avoid errors is to preview your post until you are certain everything is correct!
I shit you not one goddamn bit.
To be fair, there were voices of reason
After getting lost down this rabbit hole for a few hours, I ended up posting these comments to the github diaspora project issues
Well, it looks like my comment on the issue isn't being shown publicly.
Good thing I took some really bad advice and decided to copy the raw markdown version of [my] post before submitting it.
Oh wait - no need because you can actually edit comments on github issues.
Imagine that! It's a goddamn Christmas miracle all up in github. Mofos be editing with abandon! Look out, neckbeard42 is going to go back and maliciously edit his comments to make shabang7 look like a stupid head. OMG! :scream: ^emoji^
Okay - I'll cut and paste my comment here:
I want to contribute to the bountysource but I am unclear as to what form the edit feature will take. I have a few hundred dollars I'd like to add to this bounty and I'd like to encourage my friends and followers to contribute as they can. I'd like to raise the total to over $1000 but I need to know what it is that is being proposed.
Maybe I'm being unfair, but reading over the conversations dating back to 7 yrs ago (in a few different places) - I think all the fretting about people going back and changing a comment or post in bad faith amounts to a user hostile attitude.
Most people will use the edit feature in good faith. The few that don't will lose engagement and trust. For the most part, we are adults. I think we can handle the incredible responsibility of editing our own words and managing our own credibility.
Maybe that is no longer an issue and that fear of users abusing the edit feature has been put to bed. From what I've read, it is not clear to me.
In fact, there doesn't seem to be an easy to understand overview of how the edit feature is envisioned from a UX point of view.
Questions a user wanting the edit feature might have:
1. As a diaspora user, will I be able to publish a post, re-read it 3 days later and edit an autocorrect mistake (change 'poop' to 'park')?
2. Ten hours later, I get comments asking for clarification - will I be able to edit the post again to add an addendum to the bottom of the post clarifying the details of my narrative?
3. Will there be a time limit of minutes, days, weeks, months for editing?
3. Will I be able to make similar edits to my comments on my or someone else's post?
4. Will there be the typical notation on the post/comment that the post/comment wasedited 20 minutes ago(for example)
5. Will we be notified of every edit made on posts or comments we've interacted with?
6. If I make a bunch of changes experimenting with the markdown to get the best presentation I can, will I irritate the people with a bunch of notifications?If anyone herding this effort along thinks it would help, I am more than happy to jump into the IRC channel or participate here or in whatever comms channel best suits the project to help specify what the feature will look like from a user perspective - both in detail and in a tl;dr format.
I used to work as a technical writer so I'm equipped to interface with technical people and translate it into end user.
Do you want to contribute to the Edit Feature Bounty?
User should be able to edit posts
PS - If you think I notice a typo and I'm going to make use of my own #tip here to retrieve the text with the markdown markup from the .json file, you are out of your got'dammed mind.
I'd almost rather fuck myself in my own face with a cinder block.
#tip #json #markdown #why-the-eff-doesnt-diaspora-have-edit-features-yet #thomrant #github #bountysource #diaspora-issues #sorry-if-i-hurt-feelings #humor #just-the-tip #mole-hill #mountain #dumpsterfire #mystory #tilting-at-windmills