Pandacap: Part 4 - Inbox

Although it's not public-facing, the Inbox is perhaps the most useful part of the Pandacap web app. As a descendant of Artwork Inbox (Pandacap is built on EF Core + Cosmos DB in a very similar manner), the Pandacap inbox pulls in new posts from ActivityPub, Bluesky, DeviantArt, RSS/Atom, and Weasyl, and allows the logged-in user (me) to view and dismiss them, kind of like an email inbox.

Posts from users and feeds you follow are split between four different inboxes:

Image posts: DeviantArt and Weasyl art submissions, and any ActivityPub, Bluesky, and RSS/Atom posts that have an image attached. (Unlike the Pandacap gallery, these aren't called "artwork" posts, because Pandacap can't tell whether an image post is "art" or not.)
Text posts: DeviantArt journal entries and status updates, and any ActivityPub, Bluesky, and RSS/Atom posts that don't have an image.
Shares: If an ActivityPub and Bluesky post is showing up in your feed because it was shared / reposted / boosted by the user you follow, it will be sent here, instead of to the image post or text post sections. Pandacap will group shared posts by the user who shared them, not by the user who originally posted them.
Podcasts: RSS/Atom feeds that have an attached audio file will be sent here.

The user experience here is heavily inspired by the Fur Affinity and Weasyl inboxes: posts are shown roughly in chronological order; image posts have thumbnails and text posts only have a title; you have to click through to see the description / body of the post; checkboxes are used to remove posts from your inbox; and a "next page" button is used instead of a dynamic loading of new content.

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Pandacap: Part 3 - Creating Posts

Ascreenshot of Pandacap's main page, with the user'savatar andname, links to other sites and protocols, a searchbox, 8artwork thumbnails, and 5 status updates (2 with theirownthumbnails)

From a public-facing perspective, Pandacap is essentially just a single person's art gallery (and blog, microblog, and profile, I suppose). One of Pandacap's philosophies is that fundamentally different kinds of content are separated, so there are three types of public posts:

Artwork - a single image, with a title and description.

Journal entry - essentially a blog post, with a title and text.

Status update - text, with an optional attached image.

These are, not coincidentally, three of the four DeviantArt post types. The paradigm of Pandacap - the context in which it assumes you're creating and uploading your posts - is heavily based on art sharing platforms like it, some of which predate the rise of general-purpose microblogging.

Snail#

Entries tagged with deviantart

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