Sooo I just released RC2

System icon improvements, Explorer hottracking

I resolved an issue that had plagued loading file icons since I first implemented it for RC1. What happened was that when you select a node it just goes to the default node icon (which is the folder icon). The way I resolved it was really as simple as loading the icon before setting the ImageKey and SelectedImageKey things instead of after.

On top of that, I also made it so new files added would get their icons loaded as well, wrapping up the implementation of the feature. I’m confident enough in it that using system icons is now the default.

Also notice that nodes in the Explorer have a hover effect like hyperlinks. In Winforms this is internally called hottracking, and while it doesn’t really do anything I think it looks nice.

Minor About box change

For the sake of having something more here, the icon in the About box is now gone. Here’s a fun comparison between it and Notepad’s:

Where to get RC2

Github or my site. Here’s the changelog:

1.0 RC2:
   + View Output in Default Browser added to editor
   + Pages and Includes can be dragged into the editor as paths from [#root#]
   + Site Tree node hover (hottracking) effect
   + Numerous system icon improvements
       - Load File Icons rephrased to Use System Icons
       - System icons switching to a folder icon when selected has been fixed, as well as 
       - Newly added files now use system icons properly
       - System icons are now used by default
   - Markdown [#root#] links in previews are now rendered out properly
   - Start menu tile small icon fixed
   - More About box tweaks
   - Preview button text is now "Preview" for pages, "Debug" for templates, and "View" for include files

The good fixes are the short fixes

So, it seems that around the time I released RC1 I did a bunch of reworking with the way Apricot walks through the input page folder. I had noticed that it had started processing files multiple times in the same run. Turns out that had been a borked fix, where I slipped in an extra few lines that ended up repeating what Apricot was to do.

As you can see in this commit of when I fixed it, the mistake was running the walking process for each subfolder.. after all of the files had already been found through a recursive search (.GetFiles(pattern, SearchOption.AllDirectories)). All I had to do was comment out those three lines. It was a rookie mistake.

Unknown file types

I added unknown file extension checking to Apricot, meaning that when you do something like slip an image into the Pages folder it will throw a dialog prompt to make sure that it is indeed a page.

AutoSite Core behavior is just continuing as normal with a warning, which is also displayed in the log in the AutoSite interface if you choose to continue:

The warning nor dialog will show if the file is a dotfile (starts with .) or doesn’t have an extension. The extensions list is this, which is shared with the editor in the AutoSite interface:

txt
md
css
ts
js
html
htm
php
xml
json
csv
lass
sass

Prompt layout improvements

The prompt that shows up when a site isn’t open has been around for the longest time, and for the longest time I haven’t been able to get aligned quite right. Now, I’d say it’s pretty alright. Additionally, a new brief description of the Attribute Map has been added when it’s empty. I’ve found it a little difficult to explain what it is to people, so hopefully that’ll aid a bit. Rather pleased with how these came out.

Editor clarifications

For a little bit, I thought of disabling the Preview button for templates, as it only previewed a skeleton of the page without any includes or Apricot support.

In the end I decided to clarify the text a bit instead, and it’s now called “Debug” for templates and just “View” for include files.

A dilemma

I’ve known about this issue with Markdown pages for a good, good while, all throughout the time I had the microblog in fact.

What happens here is that the library I use for parsing CommonMark markdown really doesn’t like spaces in paths, so it won’t render it out to an a tag. Initially, I swapped the backslashes for forwardslashes to no avail, and then I swapped spaces for %20 encoded spaces. Which, at first, appeared to work.

If local Then
    newHtml = newHtml.Replace("[#root#]", (siteRoot & "\includes\").Replace(" ", "%20"))   
    content = content.Replace("[#root#]", (siteRoot & "\includes\").Replace(" ", "%20"))
Else
     Dim root = FillString("../", CountCharacter(filename, "\"))
     newHtml = newHtml.Replace("[#root#]", root)
     content = content.Replace("[#root#]", root)
End If
```

The problem? The encoded spaces messed up the paths used in actual HTML tags for embedding images, stylesheets and whatnot.

I’ve still yet to resolve this, but I’m feeling what could work out is that Apricot could run some RegEx like [.*]\((.*)\) to selectively encode the spaces in the paths that are in Markdown links and images.

Hi while writing this I realized that the problem was really just that I should’ve written a proper file:/// url, cool

…And that means that four issues were closed on this very day. (Or, these two days, since it’s already tomorrow.) Time to rest easy. See you in the next one.

o7

Since its inception, w2krepo had lived on my personal dotcomboom.somnolescent.net domain. I’m excited to announce that it now resides at w2krepo.somnolescent.net.

Moving the files was fairly painless, as the subdomain had been set up under my current FTP account. What was next was redirecting the old URLs to match the new domain, also fairly simple when you get down to it: just this .htaccess file in the w2krepo folder:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://w2krepo.somnolescent.net/$1 [R=301,L]

That left one thing: trying to get my root directory on the subdomain to display the builtin Apache directory listing was a bit problematic, so I settled on using a basic PHP script scraped from what I could find online:

<?php
$fileList = glob('*');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    if(is_dir($filename)){
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '/">', $filename, '</a><br>'; 
    }   
}
echo '<br>';
$fileList = glob('*.7z');
foreach($fileList as $filename){
    if(is_file($filename)){
        echo '<a href="', $filename, '">', $filename, '</a><br>'; 
    }   
}
?>

It’ll work as a root for now, and I intend on messing more with .htaccess to get the subdirectories’ listings all prettied up as well.

For the future, I intend to get some sort of system up for user submissions, whether that be by anonymous FTP or an upload form, as well as some more information on the indexes and homepage.

One of my more long term plans for AutoSite was to get it localized and eventually used in more languages. I’ve worked a little bit on this, and now have a system coming together.

In .NET Winforms, there’s a property you can check to generate localizable code in your project’s .resx files. All that I had needed to do to start making AutoSite translatable was to check it in each form. Now, AutoSite’s .resx files can now be edited for any string (or really, any property as I understand it) on the form.

While I could do localizations all manually in the Resource Localization Editor or Visual Studio if I wanted to, it’s not the most effective workflow nor very intuitive or open for contributors. So I looked into both PoEditor and Crowdin, two options that seem to be popular in the realm of GitHub. I eventually settled on Crowdin, for its completely free tier for open source projects and ability to use machine translations or “TM”s, or translation memory gathered from other projects on the site.

Setup was straightforward and aside from some encoded images (used for the Visual Studio 2017 and Windows XP icon themes) that I needed to hide, it all showed up flawlessly, allowing me, and anyone who would want to contribute, to edit strings for just about any language under the sun.

I already have 100% of the controls translated through TMs, Crowdin’s machine translations and mi Español mal. What this means is that there is something I have to test with and a proof of concept. It’s not.. good tacospeak, probably by any stretch, but it’s something to test with and have open for contributions.

As for when I get to implementation, what’s next? For one, figuring out how to get these translations in the program with a way to switch between them, and additionally hopefully moving strings used for message boxes out of the source code into the .resx file so all of that could be managed from one place, not only for localization but also just in good practice: currently, all of AutoSite’s dialog messages are just in the code, like this:

If MsgBox("AutoSite will create a site in the folder located at " & path & ". Is this OK?", MsgBoxStyle.Question + MsgBoxStyle.OkCancel) = MsgBoxResult.Cancel 
    Exit Sub
End If

I believe moving this text into the .resx resource files will not only help with translations, but also keeping all the wording consistent and easy to update.

There’s the plan so far; expect more progress updates in the future.