Kolony.org is a new Hive front-end built for speed and designed to run on all platforms. It can be installed on mobile devices as an app or used in a browser. In addition, it can talk to either HiveAuth or HiveKeychain to sign in.
Since publishing my last post, Kolony.org has seen some improvements. I wanted to share some details about the recent changes, why, and how they were done. And talk about what is coming next.
The random page shows you a random, recently-published blog post. Before, the only way to advance to a new, randomly-selected post was to refresh the page. The refresh button makes this action more convenient and quicker.
Previously, the "install app" menu in Chrome browser and Brave showed the wrong logo image. This fix took a long time to figure out. The nuxt-PWA nodeJS package was caching old images inside its folder, and the web host was caching the node_modules folder in production. So I had to set an environment variable for the host to stop caching the environment.
Shrinking the bundle size makes the site load much faster. Win-win! The default behavior was to load 100% of the icons. I had to change nuxt.config.js to tell the framework which icons are needed explicitly.
It made no sense to have a section for the photography community and not display the photos in the posts. Therefore, posts will show their images now. However, they come from 3rd party image servers and take much longer to load compared to text from the posts.
There is still some funkiness with image sizing for some posts. In some cases, images overflow their parent CSS containers. I'll tweak this later.
VIMM posts weren't being identified correctly because the URL routing is different compared to other Hive front-ends. This has been semi-fixed. There is still some weirdness for "going live" VIMM posts.
In some cases, Exxp provides a canonical URL in the post metadata. When present, Kolony will use the canonical URL to link back to the original WordPress site. In other cases, Kolony has to fall back to linking to hive.blog because the canonical URL is missing.
When you share links on Twitter, Discord, etc., previously, you would get a dull, generic content preview. Now, you will get a rich card with a preview of the blog text. And if an image is attached to the post, the first image will appear in the content preview card.
@rishi556)Because content previews were implemented, it became viable to use Kolony.org with the HivePOSH system. This should now be working, such that if you have registered your Twitter handle with HivePOSH and you tweet a link to Kolony.org Hive content, Poshbot should pick it up.
Kolony.org maintains a list of bot accounts that are hidden from discussion threads. This makes the discussion threads cleaner to read and easier to engage with.
Many tweaks have been made to formatting and caching to improve the quality of life for Kolony readers. Try it out!
What is next in the Kolony dev backlog?
Kolony has an upvote button, but it is not currently wired up. I plan to add a vote-weight selection slider to the app, similar to PeakD. However, having upvotes without a slider is not viable since anyone above 500HP wants to choose the voting power.
If you use Kolony in its app form, the experience is a little clunky because it does not have a back button as the browser does.
What I plan to do to solve this is add a navigation bar that appears in the app only when you are using the PWA.
There is a trick to doing this. The PWA has an option where the developer can specify an entry-point URL. You can append string parameters
To this URL like "start_url": "./?mode=standalone" and then put code in the app to behave differently when the mode=standalone param is present.
Lower priority, I would like to add a Markdown editor to Kolony so that the app can be used to publish new posts.
In discussions with other devs, some ideas came up about using Ceramic accounts. And some ideas about how we could support posting links to Kolony for other users to discuss.
Kolony's HiveAuth sign-in flow is functional. But the design is ugly and could use an overhaul. The menu flow could also be streamlined to make it easier for new users to understand.
Thanks for reading! Follow me for future dev updates.
