Tag: software

Changelog

While working on the software code I’ve been keeping a list of changes over time, using the software tracking tool git. I thought I’d share that “changelog” here for posterity, as I won’t include it in the initial “release” of the software package for public consumption.

These entries may not be entirely clear as they’re usually shorthand summaries of the work that’s just been done. Sometimes they represent just a line or two of code changes, and sometimes they represent many new functions and features coming in all at once. But here they are (in reverse chronological order as of today) in case they’re useful:

2022-04-09
  • Add but don’t use a welcome widget, need to work out width issues
  • News item trend chart
  • Latest news dashboard widget and starred feed activity count
  • Remove default account widget
  • Initial setup for dashboard stat widgets
  • Reorder sidebar for daily workflow
  • Enable dark mode and collapsible sidebar on desktop
  • Add Filament config to our package’s published configs for simplicity
  • Don’t show activity section in create feed form
  • Disable manual creation of news items
  • Specify feed check freq when importing, better docs for import/export
  • Default to only last 7 days of news, show more records per page
  • Make news items globally searchable with useful result formatting
  • Create artisan command, job and schedule for checking bulk feeds
  • Make it look better on smaller devices
  • Align image center within container
  • WIP: news item media display in curation view
  • Support different title generation methods, move fetch history timeframe to config
  • Allow for apparently ridiculously long article URLs
  • Include parent methods in configuring and booted so Filament can load Livewire
2022-04-08
  • Refactor base class structure for better reusability of last check/update functions
  • Docs
  • Docs and clarifications
2022-04-07
  • Icon update for FB items until we can get a real one in there
  • Include feed names in curation view
  • Basic FB post fetching is working
  • WIP: adding bulk feed handling
2022-04-06
  • Start adding some better documentation in README and config
  • Set up package command scheduling
  • Add console command to refresh Crowdtangle feeds
2022-04-04
  • Action to refresh/create feeds from Facebook Pages and Groups
  • Basic setup for Crowdtangle API access
2022-04-03
  • Basic news item index tests
  • Add livewire test to check Source creation through Filament
  • Ridiculous scaffolding to support authenticated users when testing Filament views
  • Load Filament and base laravel migrations so we can test Filament
  • Maybe help testbench with package discovery
  • Add example app key to phpunit for local testing
  • Include Livewire service provider so tests will pass
  • Included deleted feeds and sources for purposes of relationship fetch
  • Visually indicate that feeds are failing in the table
  • Have content curation record URLs go to the article in a new window
  • Expand length of media_url field to accomodate ridiculous image URLs
  • Add feed export command
  • Feed importing is working
  • Initial setup for feed importing

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Side project: CrowdTangle API PHP library

One of the requirements for the tool I’m building is to integrate with the CrowdTangle API to pull the latest posts from Facebook groups and pages for consideration to be included in Bloomfield’s Daily Bulletin.

Since Facebook does not provide API access to Facebook page or group content unless you are an owner/administrator of those pages and groups, CrowdTangle is, as far as I’m aware, the one and only official tool available to journalists and researchers who want to have programmatic access to updates from a large number of Facebook groups and pages.

Here’s what the dashboard looks like on the CrowdTangle site:

CrowdTangle has some good documentation for their API but I was not able to find much in the way of tooling or libraries for interacting with their API, even though it’s used widely by journalism organizations.

Since I would need to build that kind of library for this capstone project anyway, I decided to do it in a way that could benefit other journalism organizations, and created it as an open source package that is now available on GitHub:

So now, anyone building an application in PHP that needs to integrate with CrowdTangle will have a head start that hopefully helps them get up and running much faster.

I let the Facebook/Meta/CrowdTangle folks know about it and they are currently testing it out for inclusion in their documentation. I also shared about it on my personal technology blog. And of course, I’m now making use of it in the Bloomfield web application.

Tools for building the software

Now that I’m on my way in actually building the first version of the news harvest tool, I thought I’d say a bit about the software development process itself.

We’ve decided to build this web application using the Laravel application framework. Created in 2011, Laravel is written in the PHP programming language and used around the world for building everything from personal websites to SaaS applications to mission-critical business tools. It’s also a very stable framework with a large community of open source contributors and developers for hire, which means that finding people to add and maintain Laravel functionality is relatively easy compared to more specialized or proprietary tools. All of these things combined set it up as a good choice for the Bloomfield folks to build on in the long term.

In February, I wrote on my personal technology blog about the tools I use for Laravel-based projects, and the list remains applicable here:

My standard Laravel development tools

To organize and track the work itself, since I’m the only developer working on the project, I’m mostly referring to the mockups, data model and then using a simple text file broken down into “DONE,” “TODO,” and “LATER” sections:

Continue reading Tools for building the software