Pandacap: Part 6 - Extras
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Pandacap: Part 6 - Extras
There are a couple other areas of the Pandacap application that
are probably worth drawing attention to.
There are a couple other areas of the Pandacap application that
are probably worth drawing attention to.
If I'm thinking about how often I use it, the ActivityPub
integration in Pandacap really isn't the most relevant part of
the application to me on a regular basis (that would be the inbox,
and its integration with DeviantArt and Bluesky). It was, however,
my inspiration for building Pandacap in the first place. There
were a few reasons I felt this was important:
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:
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.
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:
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.
( Read more... )Since Pandacap is a single-user application, I really didn't want
to write my own authentication and authorization system. The only
goal was to allow myself to log in, and no one else. So instead of
using an email/password combo, like the default Identity template,
I've limited it to just this:
This has been my hobby project for the better part of the past
year, and it's something I've been wanting to make a series of
blog posts about for a while. Pandacap is my personal Swiss Army
knife web app; it hosts my art gallery and microblog and collects
incoming posts and notifications across five different sites and
protocols.
The code for
Pandacap is open-source (AGPL v3). I don't imagine it will
be that useful to many people; trying to ask a non-Microsoft-stack
developer to make tweaks to it would be like asking me to
contribute to, well, anything in Python. (Plus, the code itself is
not very robust, and not at all scalable.) But I've made
some very deliberate decisions in the UI of this app, with an eye
towards my own psychological well-being. The context collapse of
traditional social media kept me away from it for years, and this
app (and one of its predecessors, Artwork Inbox)
is the reason I can follow artists on Bluesky and Mastodon without
giving up in frustration. I'm hoping that someday, these design
principles could be useful to other people who find themselves in
the same situation.