Wafy's Tools

Making some progress on the WhereAreGames site. It is kind of slow going do to some of my ideas. I have been able to water some some of the ideas and making some progress. My current hurdle is learning how to apply the File System Access API. I am hoping to use it to save and load files from the system, to make templates easier to transfer from one browser to another. From what I can see it is a pretty straight forward API, the difficult part will be building and reading the file. Which is where I am at currently.

Finally made some progress on my next feature for the WhereAreGames site. I have been working on reorganizing some existing code so I can reuse it better. As I think have said before, there are reasons people use frameworks. Essentially I am putting together my own framework. Anyone that says they are using vanilla JavaScript or any language are basically building their own framework. A long time ago I started using a framework for PHP, only because I wanted a standard for other people to refer to when looking at the code.

Lots of ideas and no ambition or will to do much of any of it. Not say I won't do it, it will eventually get built, it is a matter of when. I am leaning more toward the tournament side. I know there are a few apps out there for that, but would like to take a shot at it. The tough part is getting started. I still have some breaking up of my main library into smaller and more general pieces. Which is more difficult than it sounds. I can see why people use existing frameworks, I guess I like to torture myself.

Well the SEO changes make things worse on Google's Search and semi-better on the Bing Search. It is really odd, the key words that I am getting impressions on in the Bing Search console are ones that I put in my last update. So maybe the users on Bing just search differently than the Google users? I don't know I guess, it is nice to see my traffic on the Bing search increase, just disappointed in Google's Search console.

Ok, to do lists suck and I need to build one. That is my excuse and going to leave that there.

Did some more changes to the WhereAreGames PWA and learned some new Web API's. Had a chance to try out the Web Share Target API and File Handler API. The Share Target API, was a bit tough to get going, as it requires the Service Worker to capture the request and save it. Then you have your app to check the Service Worker to see if there was a request and have it send it back. There are a lot of moving parts that seems over complicated. Given the complexity of the Share Target API, the File Handler API it much simpler and more direct.

This past month has been pretty busy for the WhereAreGame app. I posted in a Facebook group and a Discord group to see what would happen. In the Facebook group, there were a number of new users that had issues with the long list of BattleScribe. With the OWA stats got about 24 people that returned to website about 50 unique visitors. The Facebook group is a local gaming group that I am apart of and got some feedback from them that has been helpful. I made a few adjustment based on the feedback. So now I think I have a least a few regular users, that can push me to do more with it.

Have been working on WhereAreGames a bit more. I started working on an upgrade on the army list widget. Trying to get it to display more information in a couple different way. Should make it more useful hopefully.

Was able to get Web Pack issues figured out. So that the fonts loaded properly. Looks like with the new version, some of the plugins were brought in-house. I was able to get both apps updated so everyone is on the latest of everything. I started to play with JavaScript based tracking as, I get a lot of noise in the web server logs. I put it in a couple weeks ago, and I am already seeing noise in that too. I am wondering if it is because I have in in-line with the HTML that they are loading it and executing it.

Things were a bit light this past month. I was able to finish the WhereAreGames scoreboard changes and was able to get that posted. I started working on getting the PHP version updated and also updated the JavaScript tools as well. Ran into a bit of problem with Google's Material Design icons not loading properly. It looks like WebPack is converting them to some strange file for some reason. Still working on it and hope to clean up the score view of the scoreboard as right now is doesn't separate very good between the objectives.