Welcome to PHOENIX.

phoenix. an automated masterlist for all roleplay and roleplay resource blogs.

reblog to spread the word.

Hey, it's been a long time. Like, super long. Like so long I don't even have x-kit installed on the browser I'm using to answer this to know how long it's been.

Short answer: you're right.

Long answer: trying to build this within Tumblr resulted in one huge mess of a SPA that just became too difficult to work with. Life got super busy and I just didn't have time to fight with it; and let's be honest, a huge mistake often made in tech industry is holding onto legacy code when it'd be faster and easier to just ditch almost everything and start over again.

In other words, I'm working on PHOENIX2, which will be hosted on an external platform (AWS S3) and use Angular 11 and Bootstrap 4 for a much, much better UI and UX.

Right now, I'm mainly focusing on the Add Blog functionality, since the view functionality is mostly useable if little clunky, but make no mistake, it'll still take some amount of time.

But, it's coming.

It'll be here.

Hopefully by this point you got around to fixing the situation yourself (unfortunately, at the moment, the only way to do so is to completely submit the information again), and I remember when I first saw this message, I didn't see anything amiss.

One of the features I was thinking about adding was a passcode functionality, to give users the ability to edit their entries, but doing so would require some way for the user to validate their identity, which is getting into a whole other level of complexity for an application that can't even make a functional UI.

In other words, I'm sorry!

I wanted to pop in and give you an update.

I’ve worked on mitigating the limitations of both MongdoDB DynamoDB and the TumblrAPI by working to only load the data as necessary.  

We’re actually a lot further away from this being a problem than I expected, but I’m close to a solution nonetheless.

I’ve moved development and experimental features to a secondary blog:

https://masterlistphoenix-beta.tumblr.com/

So if you want to see it as its newest, feel free to check that out.  I won’t be posting anything on the blog though so don’t feel a need to follow it.  

Once you scroll towards the end, it’ll load more, just like the dashboard, if there’s more blogs left to show.

But, it’s important to keep in mind that the sorting and filtering will only sort and filter the blogs currently loaded.  The next step will be allowing you to pick and choose which types of blogs are retrieved to begin with, which is, again, a huge hassle that I’ll need to take one step at a time.  

It’ll actually take a little while for me to push the alpha code into this blog’s code, so I’ll probably let you know that there’ll be a brief outage when I go ahead to do that.

Hey, thanks for letting me know.

The original intention was to force one or the other to be selected, but it seems that HTML doesn’t easily support that.

I’ve removed the requirement to select the box(es) from the form.

DynamoDB will only let you retrieve 100 items at once.  Currently, this isn’t an issue, but this means that there will be a point where some blogs are not retrieved.  

Rest assured, I can fix this.

The problem is that it’s complicated.  We come to the question of backend vs frontend pagination, loading in all the data at once or only loading parts of it, having pagination vs endless scrolling, etc.

Additionally, it’s difficult to start envisioning the solution until I can see the problem firsthand.

https://masterlistphoenix.tumblr.com/user?t:sPNSO-oSFlknqlyGBrIJLQ

Another funfact:  I’m not the one assigning you the string at the end, that’s an identifier from Tumblr itself.  Don’t worry, it’s public information, I’m not revealing anything private about your blog. 

It’s referred to as a universally unique identifier (UUID).  When your blog is identified in this way, it remains identifiable even after the url changes.  It’s in general a more stable way to identify a blog.

You may notice some strange behavior, defunct options, or intermittent inoperability while new features are in development.

A little funfact about the softwear development world:

Real software development has what is referred to as environments to prevent this exact issue.  In fact, each project generally has at least four environments:  Development, UAT, QA, and PROD.  

Code is promoted in that exact order--when code in development is considered acceptable, it is moved to UAT, then QA, then PROD.  That is why most applications and websites can “Go Live,” i.e., suddenly launch new features without any strange behavior in-between. 

I’ve gotten one report of some functionality being broken in FireFox, so if you encounter issues please let me know and use Chrome or Edge while I debug the issue.  

In addition, the Fandoms list that appears for Multimuse blogs is tied to the list of muses entered.  I figured this would be the easiest way for the user, to reduce repetition, but I can add a separate Fandoms field if people would like.

ONE MASTERLIST.  ALL BLOGS.

Masterlist PHOENIX is meant to be a one-stop shop for roleplayers to network and search for other blogs to interact with.  

But, why should I tell you when I can show you?

https://masterlistphoenix.tumblr.com/list

It’s very simple and entirely automated.  Just you, a form, and a database of other blogs.  There’s no downtime.  There’s no lazy moderator who may or may not get around to maintaining the list.  It’s accessible at a click no matter when and where you may be.  

You can add yourself here:

https://masterlistphoenix.tumblr.com/add

No matter who you may be, whether you write canon characters, OCs; a single muse blog or a multimuse blog.  A main blog or side blog, or maybe you just generate and collect content related to roleplaying.

Whatever you do, there’s a place on PHOENIX for you.  

If everyone who sees this adds themselves to the list and reblogs this post, we can generate a full network of blogs for anyone to browse.  

The project is young and may yet rise to greater heights.  

I look forward to seeing your blogs.  I hope you join me on this journey.