Introducing Philomena
Over the past 6 months, the developers for the site have been bootstrapping an entirely new backend for the site named Philomena. This was deemed necessary due to unavoidable shortcomings of the previous Ruby on Rails backend, which we are planning to deprecate and release the source of within a few weeks.
The alpha testers and I believe we have gotten the release to the point where it should be usable for average use over the Rails application. You can try out Philomena using this link. (It is expected that you’ll have to again.) Please report anything you consider to be a bug, but before you do, please also read the following:
Over the past 6 months, the developers for the site have been bootstrapping an entirely new backend for the site named Philomena. This was deemed necessary due to unavoidable shortcomings of the previous Ruby on Rails backend, which we are planning to deprecate and release the source of within a few weeks.
The alpha testers and I believe we have gotten the release to the point where it should be usable for average use over the Rails application. You can try out Philomena using this link. (It is expected that you’ll have to again.) Please report anything you consider to be a bug, but before you do, please also read the following:
- The scraper does not work correctly, and does not fetch Tumblr posts at all. This is due to an unfixed bug in hackney. When this is fixed I will let you know.
- A few things, like settings, have been moved around due to the way Ecto/Phoenix handles model updates. Some settings are not yet implemented in the interest of current development priorities; however the ones most people use should be correctly implemented.
- Pages don’t have titles yet. We will fix this eventually.
- The beta site may be down occasionally (502 Bad Gateway) as we work out issues with our deployment strategy.
API changes
In the interest of preserving API compatibility, we will attempt to rewrite requests to our exisitng Rails JSON API for as long as is reasonably feasible after the migration (~ several months). We hope most applications will be able to migrate over to the new API format before we remove the Rails app completely.
As before, you can use the filter_id parameter to override your current filter, and the key parameter to authenticate yourself to the API. Here are the new API routes:
[example]GET /api/v1/json/images/:image_id
[example]GET /api/v1/json/search
[example]GET /api/v1/json/oembed
There is also a POST route which takes a query parameter named URL. However, it depends on the scraper; do not expect it to work reliably until the scraper is fixed.
POST /api/v1/json/search/reverse
I want to help, how do I do that?
Use the beta site. Report any missing features or obvious breakages here.
If you think you are seeing something you aren’t supposed to see, you can me privately here, on IRC, or on Discord. The sooner I know about it, the better.
Welcome to Philomena!
Next week is finals week. Please don’t kill me if I’m not able to fix things as quickly as I’d like.
