cutouts

Sign up, and start adding the articles that you have read and want to remember! Deployed here!

You can find the Firefox companion add-on here

TOC

• What?
• Why?
• Local Setup
  • Creating a local test user
• Manual Test Plan
• API Documentation
• Release Notes
  • v1.1 - 2019-12-28
  • v1.0 - 2018-12-07
• TODO

What?

• Simple form with just two compulsary questions: Link and a Quote from the article that you want to remember
• As simple as it can get. Nothing fancy. Vanilla bootstrap. Vanilla font awesome.
• List public cutouts at profile page
• Share a single cutout with friends and family by emailing it to them
• Share a cutout on social media by copying it's permalink

Why?

The internet has a lot of good content, blog posts, articles, etc etc. I read a lot of stuff, and then could not find them again when I wanted to. Pocket is good for saving for later, Delicious and Pinterest are overkill for something as simple. Hence, this project!

Local Setup

Note: These steps were tested on a machine running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• Install rbenv
• Install ruby version 2.7.0
• Install bundler version 2.12.0
• Run bundle install
• [TEST] Run ./bin/rails --version
  • This ensures that you have the rails gem installed locally

Creating a local test user

• Go to http://localhost:3000
• Create a user using the Sign Up button
• Now, you will be shown a prompt on the home page saying you must confirm your user by clicking the confirmation link in your email.
• To do this process directly on the database, you can do:
  • Go into the rails console: zeus console
  • Get your user: User.all or User.first
  • Confirm your user: user.confirm
• After confirming a user, you should be able to login to your account locally.

A log of the commands to run and their output:

irb(main):007:0> User.first
  User Load (0.5ms)  SELECT  "users".* FROM "users"  ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
=> #<User id: 1, email: "a@example.com", username: "a1", created_at: "2019-09-14 04:29:01", updated_at: "2019-09-14 04:29:01">
irb(main):009:0> User.first.confirm
  User Load (0.5ms)  SELECT  "users".* FROM "users"  ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT 1
   (0.2ms)  begin transaction
  SQL (0.7ms)  UPDATE "users" SET "confirmed_at" = ?, "updated_at" = ? WHERE "users"."id" = ?  [["confirmed_at", "2019-09-14 04:32:42.534172"], ["updated_at", "2019-09-14 04:32:42.542307"], ["id", 1]]
   (6.1ms)  commit transaction
=> true

You can use this process to confirm all locally created users.

Manual Test Plan

• sign-up
  • confirm a new user using: User.find(...).confirm
• login and logout
• login, add a public cutout, check that it is accessible without login, logout
• login, add an unlisted cutout, check that it is accessible without login, logout
• login, add a private cutout, ensure that it isn't accessibly without login, logout
• edit an cutout's visibility and check if the changes are reflected

API Documentation

Check the routes file for the latest available routes

All responses are JSON formatted.

GET /api/v1/feed

• Returns the list of top 20 articles from the public feed
• Public
• Auth not required
• Rate limited

GET /api/v1/feed/:username

• Returns the top 20 public articles of the given user
• Public
• Auth not required
• Rate limited

Release Notes

v1.1 - 2019-12-28

• Switch to Ruby 2.7, Rails 6.0 and the latest version of several gems
• Switch Heroku's build pack from cedar-14 to heroku-18

v1.0 - 2018-02-07

• Add, update, delete cutouts

• Tag cutouts and then search the cutouts in a particular tag

• List all the cutouts you have stored in the past

• Export all your cutouts to UTF8 encoded HTML or JSON

• Share the permalink for an article that has the title of the article, the quote, the author and it's tags

  

• Email a Cutout to friends and family (maximum 5 at once)

  

• Add an alias while emailing so that recipients know the cutout is from you

• Display tags as Bootstrap buttons

  

• A link to the archives of the page that has the Cutout

• A companion Firefox add-on to make it easier to Cutout articles from Firefox

TODO

In descending order of priority

• Create a good homepage that has a few words about why this project at all
• User must be able to login with both username as well as email
  • Override devise? (Devise procedure here seems extremely long)
• Fix the word limit on quote (50 words?)
• Fix the sign-in and sign-up form UI
• Fix the horrible UI to make it usable at the very least (copy medium, that interface is too good!)
• A system to tag articles (single words)
• A system to search for articles (single search bar, user search, tag search, author search, quote search)
• Ability for users to export their articles into a Markdown file for local storage (A JSON file for import too?)
• A rating system for self, no sharing as yet
• Probably friendship and the ability to follow other users

Code inside this repo is licensed under MIT.

Copyright (c) 2015-2019 Siddharth Kannan All Rights Reserved.