release

Fraidycat 1.1 — Wouldn’t Take a Bath

After two months of grueling work, a grumpy but very tough cat emerges.

I was really doubting that this would come together. This was a tough one. You’ll see why in a moment. If you don’t care then, just grab a cat:

And, of course, source code is here for your inspection.

Two main goals with this one:

  1. To speed up the parser. I follow philosopher.life and it stalls the extension every few minutes while it downloads 30 megs worth of wiki.
  2. To separate the scraper. I’ve already encountered issues with Twitter and Instagram changing things - and I don’t want to re-release every time this happens.

Turned out to be an enormous struggle to get through these. It basically amounted to rewriting everything. But I’m there. Fraidycat can follow a 30 meg feed without sweating. And I now have a rule file that lets me update scraping rules on a moment’s notice.

Beyond these changes, though, I managed to fit in loads of extras.

  • A new dark mode.
  • New sorting and view options. (Found on the right-hand side of the follows list.)
  • Expand all option so you can see all the titles of all follows at once.
  • Show updates options which lets you turn off a follow getting bumped to the top if they edit a post.
  • Twitter threads are also now collapsed and additions to the thread are treated as updates.
  • The original author is now shown on retweets.
  • Twitch support. In fact, Fraidycat now shows when a follow is ‘live’.
  • Kickstarter projects and user/company profiles can be followed.
  • Pinterest support. You literally no longer need to visit Pinterest. You probably weren’t already.
  • YouTube user URLs now work. (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/user/562Steezy)
  • Github users and projects can be followed.
  • Initial support for Facebook - right now it’s just public user pages. And be advised - it kind of sucks.
  • LegibleNews.com support. This was me. I asked for this.
  • New FOLLOWING animation.

My list literally has hundreds of items on it - these are just the major ones. I expect some polish is still needed. So please stop by the bug file cabinet if you hit something. I’m glad to help.

Next up: I am working on the visual design further. I’m not entirely happy with how Fraidycat looks. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to fix it - but I have some ideas I want to try, especially to improve the post titles area. (The area you click to expand.)

THANK YOU to everyone in this list who submitted bugs and who helped brainstorm solutions.

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