Edit your old blog post with ease!

What is Steem Ultimate Editor?

Steem Ultimate Editor poised to replace markdowns with simple buttons to create a post! Creating post shouldn't be so troublesome and requires a significant amount of time on trial and error. What if I tell you, there's a tool that allows you to just click buttons in order to perform some basic and even advance customization to the style of your post? Let's have a look what Steem Ultimate Editor brought to the table this time after an improvement over the last version. Which you can check out here.

Objectives

Allow minnows or newcomers to have a more friendly environment to create posts
Significantly reduce the amount of time taken to create a post
Beautify your post within clicks!
Promoting high quality posts with future features such as source checking

Feature for the day : Edit your old blog post with ease!

Most of the editor on steem platform allows you to post once and for all. But what about you have mistakes that you forgot to change? And unluckily, you also posted on steem blockchain. So most of the editor haven't integrate this feature to let you amend the post you posted. And Steem Ultimate Editor just did that.

How does it works?

As steem blockchain is an immutable chain, changes to any part of blocks will render it unusable. But for steem posts, it is permitted to edit your post. But it is a clever way to store the edited content without re-storing the whole post. It works by just storing what changed in the post by using a library called 'diff-match-patch'. It takes two parameter which is the original post and the edited post.

This library will generate result that looks like this :

Img src

** Notice the plus and minus sign indicating changes to texts. So we only need to store these changes and use steemapi.broadcast.comment to post it on top of the same post.

The trickiest part of this feature

As my editor will directly parse the data retrieved from blockchain, the post body might be a markdown or html depending on user preference. Sometimes mixture of both. So we need to separate out if it's a valid html or not by using this function :


export function isHTML() {
    const OPbody = oldPost.body;
var a = document.createElement('div');
a.innerHTML = OPbody;

for (var c = a.childNodes, i = c.length; i--;) {
    if (c[i].nodeType == 1) return true;
}

return false;

}

And from here, you need to use any markdown parser to html. Steemit use remarkable but I prefer showdown. But both of them perform well.

Recognizing video link, image link

As steem ultimate editor uses different syntax to recognize if it's a video or images, I need to "teach" my editor to recognize certain pattern by using regex.

Lets say an image regex will look something similar to this :


const imageRegex = />(https?:\/\/(?:[-a-zA-Z0-9._]*[-a-zA-Z0-9])(?::\d{2,5})?(?:[/?#](?:[^\s"'\][()]*[^\s"'\][().,])?(?:(?:  \.(?:tiff?|jpe?g|gif|png|svg|ico)|ipfs\/[a-z\d]{40,}))))/gim;
        video = /https?:\/\/(?:vimeo.com\/|player.vimeo.com\/video\/)([0-9]+)\/*/g

And then I need to convert it to something recognizable by my editor. For example, an image syntax for my editor will have figure tag and also contenteditable="false" . A link that is embedded will have div class of embed and etc. All changes that is needed to display a post with minimum error. This is of course oversimplification of what I've done. If you want to know more in details, do check out my github :)