this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
6 points (75.0% liked)

Perchance - Create a Random Text Generator

446 readers
20 users here now

⚄︎ Perchance

This is a Lemmy Community for perchance.org, a platform for sharing and creating random text generators.

Feel free to ask for help, share your generators, and start friendly discussions at your leisure :)

This community is mainly for discussions between those who are building generators. For discussions about using generators, especially the popular AI ones, the community-led Casual Perchance forum is likely a more appropriate venue.

See this post for the Complete Guide to Posting Here on the Community!

Rules

1. Please follow the Lemmy.World instance rules.

2. Be kind and friendly.

  • Please be kind to others on this community (and also in general), and remember that for many people Perchance is their first experience with coding. We have members for whom English is not their first language, so please be take that into account too :)

3. Be thankful to those who try to help you.

  • If you ask a question and someone has made a effort to help you out, please remember to be thankful! Even if they don't manage to help you solve your problem - remember that they're spending time out of their day to try to help a stranger :)

4. Only post about stuff related to perchance.

  • Please only post about perchance related stuff like generators on it, bugs, and the site.

5. Refrain from requesting Prompts for the AI Tools.

  • We would like to ask to refrain from posting here needing help specifically with prompting/achieving certain results with the AI plugins (text-to-image-plugin and ai-text-plugin) e.g. "What is the good prompt for X?", "How to achieve X with Y generator?"
  • See Perchance AI FAQ for FAQ about the AI tools.
  • You can ask for help with prompting at the 'sister' community Casual Perchance, which is for more casual discussions.
  • We will still be helping/answering questions about the plugins as long as it is related to building generators with them.

6. Search through the Community Before Posting.

  • Please Search through the Community Posts here (and on Reddit) before posting to see if what you will post has similar post/already been posted.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

This likely won't be relevant to a lot of devs here, because the remember plugin does the job fine in most cases, but:

Here's a normal text input (id is not needed for this example, but is almost always needed so adding it here):

<input id="thingyInput">

And here's one which remembers what you type into it even after page refresh:

<input id="thingyInput" oninput="localStorage.thingy=this.value" value="[localStorage.thingy || '']">

Of course, the remember-plugin can do this for you, but I often find myself reaching for the above pattern for its simplicity.

localStorage is what the remember-plugin uses behind the scenes - whatever you store in it will be persisted even after page refresh. It's a built-in browser/JavaScript feature - not something that's specific to Perchance.

The || '' in [localStorage.thingy || ''] means or ''. In other words, it means or output nothing. If you want a default value for when the user loads the page for the first time, you could write [localStorage.thingy || 'blah'] which means "use whatever is in localStorage.thingy if it exists, otherwise use 'blah'"

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] wthit56 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You could even do something like localStorage[this.id]=this.value. Not sure if that would work for getting the value though... 🤔

Quick question on this topic... is localStorage "safe"? Does it only store for that specific generator (like, localStorage's behavior is overridden for that), or can it pick things up and change things from other generators?

[–] perchance 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

is localStorage “safe”? Does it only store for that specific generator (like, localStorage’s behavior is overridden for that), or can it pick things up and change things from other generators?

Yep, it's safe. Each generator gets their own subdomain, and browsers partition storage based on subdomain/origin, so one generator cannot read the localStorage of another generator. If you want to do that, then you need to control both generators, and you'd need to embed one within the other, and use postMessage

[–] wthit56 1 points 3 months ago

Thank you 👍

Yeah, it's just not easy to figure out that actually generators are running in their own subdomain--once someone explained that, I could see how it worked 😁

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Quick question on this topic… is localStorage “safe”?

The localStorage is contained inside each generator, meaning that values set from one generator can only be accessible from that generator (like not tied within the localStorage from the entire Perchance website), so it is safe. Basically, every generator has its own localStorage container, and there's an explanation to why.

[–] wthit56 1 points 3 months ago

Ooooh, okay. So secretly they're running from their own subdomain, and subdomains have their own localStorage I think. Great 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I remember this one using only the localStorage thing and I think I'm actually using this in some of my generators. After trying this a bit, I found a benefit from using this method, that the data will stay in the input even if the generator is reloaded through the auto-reload feature when editing the generator's code.

Using the remember plugin, in normal circumstances, that would reset the value when it's auto-reloading. And I'd also like this kind of behavior to be implemented right into the plugin so that remembered variables (and not just the user inputs) can retain its value even when auto-reloading generators.

[–] perchance 2 points 5 months ago

Ah good point. I think for this what I'd ideally need is a global 'onUpdate' function so plugins can 'do something' when the update function is called (as happens with the auto-reload checkbox thing). There are hacky ways to do this (effectively "wrapping" the update function), but it might be about time for a proper solution.

[–] Cocell 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I want a suggestion. And a report as well. The remember plug-in is totally amazing, I can agree on it 100%! But, the remember plug-in has one flaw; it cannot detect programmatically changed values.

Now, calling it a flaw might be an overstatement, because I, myself created an entirely new script to perform automatic saved and load of values, and that too cannot detect changes made hy program. I tried to tweak it a bit, but I was still unsuccessful.

[–] perchance 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Fair point! I think I can fix this (using MutationObserver), but it'll need to be opt-in (e.g. via an extra keyword like @includeProgrammaticInputs or something [but ideally shorter...]), since it's a "breaking change". But before I do: Another flaw is that you can't choose to only remember specific inputs, right? My memory is a little fuzzy and I can't see anything about that on the page or in the code. If so, I'll try fixing both issues at once.