Overdue update, with help from Claude

I've just released v1.0.9538 of the Inner Drive Journal, the software that runs The Daily Parker. This release added two big security features that I've been working toward for years.

First, the big one: users can now set up profiles using their Google IDs. Just go to the login page and click on "Sign in with Google." Google will tell you that the blog will read your name and user ID, and if that's OK with you, the Daily Parker will create a profile for you. This will enable you to set a couple of preferences and see posts with Authenticated privacy.

Despite the 30 years of professional software development behind me, I used the Anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 agent in GitHub CoPilot to do the grunt work. It got 90% the way there before it got stuck. But Claude Opus 4.6 got me over the finish line. And the code it wrote for me wasn't bad: it did what I needed and wasn't difficult to polish.

As much as CoPilot is helping me get things done faster, I'm also learning its, ah, idiosyncrasies, and thus how to get more out of it more quickly. I've struggled to find good documentation on how to get Google Authentication working in Blazor apps for about three years now, and kept giving up. Claude got it done in two hours, because it can read a lot more documentation than I can.

Now that I've got Google authentication working here, including getting the Daily Parker verified on Google and all that, I'll be adding Google sign-ins to Weather Now in the next few days.

The second major improvement today: Users who can add things to the blog can now set the privacy to "Private," the third of the five levels the app will ultimately support. Most of the 10,000+ posts are Public: anyone can see them. A few are Authenticated: only people who have an active profile can see them, as if they're paywalled. (The Daily Parker is currently free, and I have no plans to monetize the blog, but this would be the mechanism.) The new "Private" level restricts visibility to the owner (usually the creator) and people the creator affirmatively adds to the item's access list. The first use case that I'm going to build out is my reading list. I want to see a list of all the books I've read and when I read them, but I don't want you to see the whole list. I'll set some to Public and Authenticated to demonstrate the feature, but just a few.

You can see how the Journal software has evolved on the Release Notes page.