Changelog

Even though it’s still summer, there have been several improvements since the last update.

Because of the popularity of Visualizer, there are scaling pains. Sometimes pages time out. In order to deal with this, I have to move from Heroku to another provider. Currently, I’m looking at Render, but I’m not completely set on my decision yet. Having little-to-no DevOps knowledge is definitely one of my pains. 😅

To move anywhere, however, I needed to improve several things on the backend. The biggest thing I achieved was completely removing my reliance on chromedriver to make chart screenshots.

In case you weren’t aware - every shot page comes with a tiny little meta image. So that if you paste the link to that page in Discord, Slack, Twitter, or some other tool that supports meta images, a tiny screenshot preview of the chart will appear there. Before this was done by a Rube Goldberg machine kind of process which was extremely error-prone, and taxing on my backend and deploys. Now it happens via Highcharts Export Server and is both much faster and way more reliable.

Speaking of images: as Christoph discovered if you’ve attached an image to a shot, there was no way to remove it. This has now been fixed by adding a simple Remove Image link in the shot edit form. Whoops. 🙈

There were several great ideas via GitHub Feature requests that were also added recently:

RSS feeds

Every public user now comes with an RSS feed of their shots. So you can subscribe via an RSS feed reader and be notified of any new shots they make.

Private Notes

Sometimes you want to write something down next to the shot, but don’t want the public to see that. If you’re a Premium user you’ll now have a new field under Bean notes and Notes called Private notes. Anything you enter here will only be visible to you and no one else.

It’s been a typical European summer for me, so I’ve been out and about a lot.

Still, there were many changes in the past month or so.

I’ve vastly improved site protection from script kiddies and other “hackers” who keep trying random URL attacks. Bless their souls. 😅

I’ve added a new upload scope to OAuth. This enables app developers to have a “low danger” scope so that even if a token is stolen, the worst that can happen is that the attacker can upload shots. But they won’t be able to delete them.

There has been a change to default chart temperature colors, making them easier to read, especially for people with certain disabilities. I want to do the same for the main chart, but I am yet to find a good palette. Suggestions are more than welcomed.

I’ve also created custom error pages, so you don’t land on the Heroku one if/when something goes wrong.

But the most significant change has been to the Decent People page. Since there are so many of you now, the page became very slow to load, but also it was hard to find anyone. Now you have a search there and can quickly narrow down and find exactly who you’re looking for.

Since Decent is having a booth at the World of Coffee festival in Milan, I’ve decided to run a promotion. If you sign up for the yearly plan, while the expo is taking place, you’ll get 10€ off, making the total €40/year, or ~3.3€/month.

But, as always, you can keep using the free version. It’s not going away.

P.S.: If you’re in Milan, feel free to ping me. I’ll be wandering the festival myself. 🥰