Wafy's Tools

A bit further on the DynaBallot rebuild. Was able to get the build to complete successfully, but still need to test the front end interface. Someday I should look at automating the tests for the front end. I have plenty of unit tests, but definitely could use some integration test. I just started some of the front end testing today, and already found an issue that unit tests would not find. Unfortunately, running integration tests is a bit difficult without something like Docker. Now that I am running Docker, it might be something to look into again.

Did not get as much done coding wise as I would have liked this past month. Turns out that making those changes to the libraries, had a drastic impact on the DynaBallot code. Doesn't help that I figured while I was at it I would work on some refactoring on some unrelated code. That pretty much meant that I end up rewriting much of the code. Though I did get more than half the project touched.

Mission complete, was able to update all of my library code to PHP 8.0. Not to soon and 8.1 will be out, but at least I can work on upgrading the Apps to use PHP 8.0. Once that happens it will be easier to update to PHP 8.1. In the process there are few new things I am trying out. Added a couple newish tools to my PHP code checks. The first is PHP Metric, which is a lot like PDepend with more data. It also has a violations page which helps pick out packages that are not living up to standards and gives you some general reasons why.

Didn't get a lot done in the last month. Though a lot of trial and errors trying to get my Docker images to be tested in Jenkins. It turns out that you can't use the Docker Build Step to build and run the Docker container. You can build an image but you can't build and run the container. You need to use a Execute Shell and run it via a CLI command. It is a very unclean way for it to work. However, I got it to work finally and started to convert some of my internal libraries.

Well break is over, time to dig back in. Kind of started a bit early and started converting some of my libraries to use an updated version of PHP. Ran into a bit of an issue, in that I wanted to make more use of Docker. Didn't want to install a new version of PHP on the Jenkins server and use a more contained building. Have to admit that I am still learning with Docker. Though I want to make more use of it for some pieces of my apps.

No major updates. Still working on the new widgets for the Where Are Games site. They are pretty much done, just working out some bugs and UX testing yet. I setup a dev site for the Where Are Games, to help test the widgets out. It has been pretty stable, it is amazing how fast junk bots hit new host names. I did put some anti-bot headers, robots.txt and some meta tags. So there is no excuse for this site to show up in search. It is funny I have one version of a site that I don't want searchable and another that I do but can't get it to list properly.

Started to look at the next section of WhereAreGame. Trying something different, I am using a mind map to flush out feature and option ideas. Still kind of trying to figure out if it works for me or not. It seems more like an outline in 2D or 3D depending on the software you use. One thing that it has helped with is I can look at it and find something to add to it, where an outline is tough to visualize see where to add.

Small updates on both of the apps last week. I added dark mode to the DynaBallot app. Was also trying to add some other lock down headers to the app, but using 3rd party scripts makes it very difficult to implement since most do not support it. I tried to implement COOP and COEP, but for the COEP a few of the 3rd party scripts do not support the headers needed to do cross-domain requests. I was also looking into other headers to prevent cross site attacks as well and no luck. Going to need more research to replace what can't be supported.

I was able to get the DynaBallot update pushed out. The biggest delay was the policies and the parts needed for those policies. Some of that delay was some work with Docker for a development environment. I was able to add a new ballot type also, so check out the Dynaballot blog site.

Still working on the DynaBallot update slash privacy policy issue. I did a little more research and found that there are a number of "generators" out there that can provide a relatively sound privacy policy. From some of the testimonies and some blog posts that I have read they seem to work well. While there are some that are mostly free, they still need to make money. The one that I am planning on going with adds sections for different regions and charges for those sections.