ByteCode.News is changing, getting better

We're starting to get there!

The site and bot keep having new issues identified - I'm not tracking issue propagation or distribution, but since the first slightly-broken deployment online a few weeks ago, it's had a lot of issues filed and fixed, covering operations and the UI - and the UI is probably the biggest change.

I don't know that the reference UI (what you're probably reading right now, if you're reading it near its publication) is good - the emphasis was on getting something spun up and deployed that exercised the core services "properly." It needed to support humans, and needed to demonstrate features for SEO - so sites like google, etc., would see a version of the site that was consistent and legible, while humans could use it based on the backend services.

Most of the changes being put in are "spot changes" - things like "Oh, I see the /whois on IRC is still the IRC library default." Fixing that takes a little bit of time - not because of the actual modification (it's something like four lines) but because of testing and the actual full build. The test coverage for the site isn't perfect (whatever "perfect" means) but it's not bad; in a three-minute build (for the full backend test suite, with 41 modules) it sits right at 80% - with the modules getting the worst coverage being the ones that actually rely on services, like the CLI console and Discord connectors.

Thank goodness for mvnd, BTW - this build would be bonkers mad without multithreading the build. There're a few core modules that hold up others, but in general the build is pretty flexible.

There're still some really important features on the horizon - I'd like to see bash.org-style quote boards (I miss bash.org!), shortcode support, and an RSS reader interface as well before too long, and if anyone wants to contribute those features or a cleaner better user interface, I'm happy to provide guidance as time and ability permit. There are a lot of other features that are falling out of the design as natural improvements as well, but they're likely to be slightly less visible until you know what to look for.

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