The "Revert a Deleted Feature and Fix It Up" Release

Added back mood tracker.

Mood Tracker

Mood tracker lets you log mood, activities, and a note on a daily basis. Moods and activities are fully customizable based on your needs. Activities can be archived for later use to reduce clutter.

Entries can be viewed by month and year.

Coming soon

• Analytics
• Trends
• Streaks

The "Rewrite the Whole Backend Using Firebase" Release

• Updating the whole backend to use Firebase
  • No more python, no more flask
  • Now using:
    • Firestore
    • Cloud Functions
    • Firebase Auth
    • Firebase Hosting
    • Firebase Storage
• Removed the tracker(daily activity/mood tracker ) submodule. May rewrite at a later date
• Removed the search feature. May reimplement using algolia later. Firestore doesn't do plaintext search

This release is important in that it removes the need for a dedicated webhost running python. All of the usage(db r/w, function calls, storage, hosting) I'd ever need for this site fits squarely in the Firebase free tier.

Something for a for a later date is getting OneDrive image to upload directly into Firebase Storage.

The "Let's Just Get Everything Buildable Again" Release

• Updating aurelia to latest verison. This includes:
  • aurelia-framework
  • aurelia-cli/webpack, replacing grunt/jspm toolchain
• Removing bus-tracker. Because that now lives at vrtDashboard

Bundle sizes seem similar or smaller and load performance hasn't been affected.
Science Endorsed Anecdote™ 👍

The "For the Love of Sanity" Release

Features

• Editor will warn you against leaving with unsaved body content.
• Editor saves content to localstorage witha 1s debounce. After an unexpected close, it will ask if you want to reload content.
• Added Tags for posts.
• Added a Tips tab for any posts tagged with tips.
• The sidebar should stick to the content in the middle of the page. Once you scroll past it, the following posts should be fully centered.

Fixes

• Search now looks at location and comments.
• About page is now its own thing and not a big one-off hack of the post view.

Fortification

• Reorganized a lot of the backend code into different modules. Should improve maintainability.
• Proxy image loading is now an attribute.
• Removed last vestiges of HTTP.
• Created an inheritance hierarchy for post list views(i.e. main blog, drafts, search, tags). So far this has made diverging details of the views easy while maintaining the same basic behavior.
• Reworked a bunch of the CSS to solidify the purpose of certain rules. Things should work and look better now.

The "Congress Made Me Do It" Release

Features:

• We are now HTTPS only! All traffic redirects to HTTPS #thanksCongress
• Gzipping favicon
• Added confirmation dialogs for any DB mutating operation
• Added (broken)button to certify old Admin comments. Do not use.
• Updated structure of New Comment Email. Now contains post title, comment content, and user email.

Fixed:

• Empty location allowed and no longer breaks Places map
• Fixed some indentation
• User welcome message now only displays after username is loaded
• Fixed login page https redirect (Deprecated now. Will remove next release)

The "Two Things and Removing Kruft" Release

Things:

• Bumped Google Analytics plugin. Now logging much more useful information
• Added OneDrive reverse proxy for when, say, OneDrive is blocked at work

Kruft Removed:

• Unused routes
• Unused classes
• Unused endpoints
• Hack fix for certain image URLs that are no longer in use

The "Update the UI and then all the backend thingz" Release

So for this one we've got a few bug fixes coupled with a menu redesign. This was triggered by some key input from one of our two stakeholders. The redesign was mostly headed up by her, I merely coded it up.

Much better than my "bare-minimum/good-enough" first version.
Features:

• New menu bar UI with better search box
• Started using aurelia-google-analytics to log traffic. Working with them to help it meet our needs a bit better. Made a couple pull requests and we'll see what happens
• Reformatting dates. Using MomentJS now
• Backend work to dashboard to track a logged in user. Makes commenting easier for us and people will know it's us because we'll be the only ones with a profile picture next to our comments! No more pretending to be us!
• Related to the last one, you can now change the post author!
• Changed initial loading font to reduct number of fonts loaded.

Fixes:

• Align profile picture top with post picture top
• CSS cleanup. Constant struggle.
• Now shows up a bit better when shared on Facebook. Curse you OpenGraph!
• Gzipping all Flask traffic, because that wasn't happening already.

The "Moving On Up" Release

Most of the work for this release was done to avoid common annoyances before our Asia trip. Being lazy is hard work.

Several major things to detail:

• WYSIWYG editor, but still understands Markdown if you need it.
• OneDrive image selector. This feature was huge for us. So much of our time blogging was used selecting images, generating the link, altering the size, and copy pasting. Granted it's still not perfect, but excelsior.
• HTTPS support. This was required for the OneDrive integration, but we now have a SSL cert from https://letsencrypt.org. Yay!
• Fixed bug where draft pagination was broken
• Refactored the post markup into a component with options. Now the blog post and list of posts use the same markdown. I'd like to do more of this in the future. Several places in the codebase have duplicate code that has to be updated twice or more to be updated at all.

Looking forward to more refactors and behind the scenes changes in the next release!
Cheers!

The "Much Better" Release

• Switched to aurelia-cli. Much more fine tuned build tool
• Load times cut in half across the board
• Number of connections down from ~200 to ~20. Bundling FTW
• Added favicon
• Cachebusting
• IE is now 90% functional on the site. Remaining 10% coming soon
• Added the new Places map that pulls location from blog posts

Just "Good enough"

What the blog has been stable with for a while.