Heart2Heart is shutting down after seven years.

ChiraBeats

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Joined: 2016-10-31

Posts: 481

Files: 43

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Easier uploading, autocompleting tags

This week's big update push mostly went into making the uploading experience more pleasant.

Responsive uploading

When uploading, you hit the button and waited until the upload finished out of nowhere. Apparently a few people gave up thinking it had frozen, but not anymore.

When hitting the upload button now, you get this lovely progress box.

Predictive error correction

Another problem with uploads is that you only see the errors *after* you've gone through the time of uploading your file. The upload form now does its best to predict errors before they ever happen:

Polite errors

When uploads are finished, you are now taken directly to your new file.

And if there's an issue, instead of ripping you away from your upload Heart2Heart now displays the error in a little box:

Clicking outside the box or clicking "Go back" will let you fix the problems with your upload without missing a beat.

For users without Javascript enabled, this all seamlessly falls back to the old behavior.

Autocompletion on tags

Even with the new list of tags available, it can still be a bit of a pain to find tags that fit quickly. So the tag boxes on both the upload page and the search page now automatically suggest tags as you type:

Even more data savings

Keeping on with the effort to reduce the amount of data used and increase loading speed, there are a few more tweaks to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the site:

Thumbnails are now stored as JPGs instead of bulky PNGs. This alone cut down the loading size of the file gallery by half, from ~600KB to ~300KB. It should load that much faster, and use that much less data.

Data usage for the page refreshes has been reduced all the way down to ~800-930bytes of compressed information for each update. To give you a very loose reference point, similar kinds of updates on other sites can take upwards of 25KB, about 30 times bigger every single time the site refreshes itself.

And more

As always, there's a large handful of different bug fixes and improvements made while all the rest of this has happened.

• Files that are still being processed now have a "Processing please wait" image displayed.

• Video files that aren't playing now have the thumbnail displayed on them instead of a blank black rectangle with a play button.

• The file preview boxes have been reformatted to fix *much* more nicely on screens where it just barely doesn't fit right.

• Thumbnails are now taken from several seconds into a video. All past thumbnails have been regenerated.

• Adjusted the layout of the mini file galleries on the home page to better suit mobile users.

• Fixed a regression where ignored users started showing up in the chat again.

ChiraBeats

Administrator

Joined: 2016-10-31

Posts: 481

Files: 43

PM Website

Re: Easier uploading, autocompleting tags

Well that was a productive few weeks. With the holidays coming up this might be the last big burst of updates for a bit.

Oh and I nearly forgot, as a holiday gift I reduced the amount of ads permanently by 30%. This site is completely run on donations and ad revenue, so if you could whitelist the site on your adblocker I'd appreciate it so much!

Happy holidays, everyone!

Last edited by ChiraBeats (2017-11-18 03:59:16)