Entries tagged "Scatter"

There have been releases of the software on Sorcerer's Isle, mostly to update URLs and fix the lack of documentation in the download packages.

The reason for the URL changes is the migration of repositories from GitHub onto my own server, details of which will follow this quick summary of the releases.

If you want more details on the releases, read the full version of this post, but in summary...

• Lucee on Jetty is now at v0.7 and both Jetty 9.4.44 and Jetty 10.0.7 have been bundled with Lucee 5.3.8

• cfPassphrase had been sitting on rc0.2 for longer than necessary and was promoted to v0.2 - there are no code changes - no need to update current projects.

• QueryParam Scanner v0.8 has been formally merged/released - again, no code changes from rc0.8, just another case of life getting in the way at the time when this should have otherwise happened.

• cfRegex v0.1.003 has been re-released as v0.3 to keep versioning consistent amongst projects, and actually has its own repository now, along with simplified packages and documentation.

• Scatter v0.1.1 does nothing more than add documentation and update the repository URL, so again nothing to update for existing projects.

Why

So that's the quick overview, but why? The primary reason for all of these releases was to change their repository URLs, from https://github.com/boughtonp/[reponame] to https://code.sorcerersisle.com/[reponame].

This is not a total move away from GitHub - it is still used for issue tracking (for the time being), and I'll most likely still push code there when full releases are made - but it will only be a secondary source/mirror. UPDATE: I have since fully moved off GitHub, use https://codeberg.org/boughtonp/[reponame] for backup repos or to report issues.

The motivation for doing this is to reduce dependency on centralised proprietary services, and removing the unwanted requirement to have JavaScript enabled.

This move would have happened a great deal sooner, but when I looked into the various Git repository browsers available, I found a lot of bloated software with features I neither needed nor wanted, hundreds of megabytes of code and dependencies, no ability to meaningfully change how it looks, and so on.

Long story short: irritated by how everything sucked, whilst also looking for a decent project to extend my Python skills, I created a lightweight and themeable Git repository browser.

GitFrit

GitFrit is capable of running on CentOS 7, only needing Python 3.6 (or newer) and Git 2.24 (or newer). The source code is currently ~0.5MB (half of that is the included templating library, which I'd like to streamline).

GitFrit is tiny in comparison to almost everything else available - even git-web with ~0.3MB of source is only slightly smaller, and that has its markup intertwined with Perl, preventing it from being themeable.

GitFrit is not quite ready for release yet - I took shortcuts to get it up onto Sorcerer's Isle sooner, and those now need to be cleaned up into configuration options, all of which needs to be documented, plus there's a couple more features I'd like it to have first.

When those changes (and thus a release) will happen is uncertain - I need to shift focus back onto other priorities, and unless there's significant interest in GitFrit, it may take me a while to get back to it and spend the time to make it publicly available.

If you are interested, do send me an email so I can let you know when it's ready.

Scatter is a JavaScript library for randomly arranging HTML elements within a containing element. It is deliberately lightweight, easy to integrate, and without dependencies.

The initial script was written to provide a scattered polaroid effect for an in-page gallery, as a reaction to the complexity found in a couple of existing libraries - both of those other libraries expected JSON files containing the image URLs, which was parsed and iterated through to generate specific markup, and neither of the libraries could be easily modified to take the simpler and more flexible approach of being pointed at existing markup.

Thus, the script that evolved into Scatter was created, with a focus on providing an easy-to-integrate and configurable scattering effect with a clean core script - i.e. following the philosophy of doing one thing well, and also making it easy for others to understand (and extend if needed).

Scatter does not convert JSON to HTML for you - that's a distinct task from randomly arranging HTML elements - but it will work whether your HTML is static or dynamic, and it does not limit you to images styled as polaroids.

The versatility is demonstrated within the Scatter documentation, where a handful of examples show how it can be used to achieve vastly different effects.

Scatter does not require any external libraries, it's a single ~12KB file (~3KB compressed) and will run in any browser released in the past five years (earlier browsers will work with appropriate polyfills, available either from MDN or backwards compatibility libraries).

If you find any issues, or you have a need that Scatter almost-but-not-quite meets, feel free to either raise an issue or get in touch directly to discuss further.