Went to a developers meetup last night that covered RethinkDB and Grunt. RethinkDB is a NoSQL database with a query syntax that reminds me of jQuery, lots of chained selectors. The primary application seems to be highly reponsive real-time apps, where its push notifications provide a simpler and more scalable alternative to having to poll the database every few seconds. It might be useful for a future project but I won't be using it for WSN because of the impracticality of helping everyone to install it on their servers.
Cool discovery of the day: SQL Fiddle. Should help with quick tests. I've been working hard on smoothing more rough edges of the bootstrap theme. That includes collapsing the menu panel at mobile sizes, styling quoted posts, and fixing up a bunch of templates. Almost ready to roll out bootstrap as a default option during setup with a choice of bootswatch color schemes. Hopefully this will prove helpful to people who don't have time to mess with the stylesheet.
Gravatars are centrally-stored avatars used by wordpress and many other scripts. The latest WSN release ads an 'autoload gravitars' switch, which finds the gravatar for anyone who doesn't upload their own avatar when registering. If you have a lot of current avatarless members, you may want to go back and load gravatars for them to make your site and especially the comments threads a bit more colorful/personalized. To do that, copy this script to a text file and save it as loadgravatars.php:
A while back, I added some automatic file extension correction code that fixed the extension for files that were named incorrectly. If somebody named a png file as my.jpg, WSN detects that it's actually a png and renames it to my.png so that thumbnails etc work correctly. Turns out there was an unexpected problem with this. It works fine with images, but other file types have MIME values which can't easily be matched to a file extension. MP3 files can have a MIME type audio/mpeg or x-wav, so WSN was renaming them with .mpeg or .x-wav extensions.
Big changes in WSN Gallery yesterday. Youtube has completely dropped support for RSS feeds and hasn't introduced any equivalent searching mechanism in their much more restrictive api v3. Since youtube isn't playing ball and I'm unable to find any workarounds or third parties to generate youtube feeds, I've changed the feed focus over to flickr. WSN Gallery can now take a flickr search term from the submit feed page instead of a youtube search term. Unfortunate to have to make the change, but hopefully flickr will prove useful to someone, as they seem committed to their feeds.