it seems like #GAGSProject isn’t getting used very often at all, so I’ve been thinking about cancelling the VPS to save myself some money every month. I don’t really have that much income so it would be helpful to spend a little less

I would still keep the source code available on GitLab, and I might even share my server configs if anyone is interested in hosting their own version. but cancelling the VPS would mean that you can’t use GAGS anymore without hosting it yourself

I just wanted to mention this in case someone wants to talk me out of it or has a good alternative for me

wow I’m actually running out of ideas for features or improvements for #GAGSProject? I just did a few minor things (switched to uvicorn instead of gunicorn, and now links can be purple after you visit them, but only in circumstances where that won’t have potentially inconsistent behavior) and now the only two things left to do - as far as I can tell - are:

• fix and simplify some messy JS (a friend is working on this for me)
• make it look less terrible on a phone browser - especially when zooming. this is going to require me to figure out a lot of CSS Bullshit so I’ve been putting it off

and anyway after that I genuinely can’t think of anything else to add

omg so apparently if you search for nothing (as in, the empty string) using the reddit API, it will give you no results at all. instead of, y’know, a list of posts sorted by new or hot or something. I had no idea about this, so you would think that if you search for nothing in #GAGSProject then you will mysteriously get no results and think (kinda correctly) that GAGS is broken

but actually no - because a totally unrelated bug was making it so that searching for nothing on GAGS was actually searching for NOT (), which was tricking reddit into returning results anyway

I only found out about the first bug because today I fixed the second. so as a temporary workaround I’m deliberately keeping the second bug for now lol (but only for the very specific circumstances where reddit will return nothing)

this is a bit of a minor update but I added two new subreddits to #GAGSProject! r/GWAQueer and r/GoneWildAudioGay

in order to make room for them in the search results UI, I switched from using tabs to a navbar. I think I like this approach more because it communicates information explicitly that I was trying to communicate implicitly in the past - although this navbar format might be a little less intuitive to folks who are used to the UI language of tabs

also, I added a new button that lets you save your gender preferences and blacklist. in the past whenever you submitted a search, your preferences would be saved, but there was no way to save them without submitting a search

I just pushed my experimental changes to production at 6am because I make bad decisions

but, everything seems to be working! #GAGSProject is now fully async. it doesn’t have lazy-loading yet but at least the whole server doesn’t grind to a halt while it’s waiting on the results of just one reddit API request

alright I now have an experimental version of #GAGSProject that uses FastAPI instead of Flask! every feature seems to work exactly the same, except now everything runs asynchronously (finally! T_T) and probably faster?

before I switch over to this version in production, though, I want to tweak one more thing: I want to lazy-load the results of people’s searches, instead of fetching all of the results at once. that way y’all can browse thousands of results if you want to - instead of being capped to just 100 - and that won’t slow the server down at all

after I’m done with this, I’m actually thinking about posting about GAGS on certain subreddits where I feel like people might appreciate the ability to search by gender (like r/GWASapphic and r/GoneWildAudioTrans)

I fucking love that you can just, put an entire JavaScript script, complete with comments, inside of an HTML <button> element and nothing will break. it will work exactly as you would expect and want it to

I’m trying to minimize JS as much as possible in #GAGSProject but I now have a button that lets you copy debug info from an error page to your clipboard to help me figure out if something is breaking, and I needed JS for that. and thankfully it was only a few lines