The development of xLog has been going on for over 3 months now and has gained a lot of awesome users, in order to give everyone a better idea of what's going on on xLog, we plan to write a summary every week to synchronize the information.
This is the first xLog weekly summary, and we'll write from September 23 (although it's still called a weekly summary) - the day xLog goes live and we promote xLog on some platforms, so it might be a little long.
Official Communities#
We have established 4 official communities, welcome to join the community to meet friends or give xLog some advice or contribute code directly:
- Join xLog's Discord channel
- In Discord we talk about whatever we want. In addition, the xLog channel hosts occasional prize creation events. The ongoing one is "What is your ideal future Internet/Web3 in five years?".
- Follow xLog's xLog
- View xLog's source code or participate in its development
- Follow xLog's Twitter
Data that Exceeds Expectations#
By indexing the data on the chain, we found that in the past 22 days, 150 users have posted 322 posts on xLog (view all posts through indexer API), which far exceeded my expectations, we were excited to hand-pick 55 of the best blogs to display on the xLog home page. Thank you all! 🥳
Much Better Performance#
Then let's talk about our development, we have done very many updates these days.
Starting with the performance. Last time we heard a lot of criticism about the speed, so we made some performance optimizations.
- We reduced the size of js file.
- We merged some requests.
- We used Redis for a layer of caching. Now all requests on the server side are cached, each visit returns the cached content first and then delays refreshing the data in the background.
- Our images are stored on IPFS and they are very slow sometimes, so we add proxy access and size compression to all images via
next/image.
Now it is at an acceptable level, but there is still a lot of room for optimization, so we will continue to optimize.
New Home Page Modules#
Then let's come to the home page, where we have added two modules Showcase and Integration. The showcase includes the hand-picked quality blogs we just mentioned, and Integration introduces the way xLog integrates and works with other Crossbell eco-projects.
More Powerful Dashboard#
We have added a new tab Others on Crossbell to the post and page list in the dashboard, which now makes it easy to convert content posted through other Crossbell platforms into xLog posts or pages. A nice practice is to convert Medium articles synced from xSync to xLog posts with just one click.
The editor now supports Markdown Generic Directives Proposal and allows more HTML tags and attributes, making you to write post more easily and freely. For example:
A :i[lovely] language know as :abbr[HTML]{title="HyperText Markup Language"}.
A lovely language know as HTML.
And a easier way to embed Youtube videos are also supported, For example: ::youtube{#pLBX9vdrtn4}
At the top of the editor, we added a Markdown-related tip xLog Flavored Markdown, Markdown standard has always been confusing and variable, so here to tell you the Markdown syntax supported by xLog.
And automatically generate page slug based on title.
Some new CSS custom properties (CSS variables) have been added in Custom CSS.
There is also a new tab for exporting data.
Personal Home Page Minor Updates#
Added table of content to the right of the posts to give readers a clearer idea of the structure of the post.
And all custom domains are automatically redirected to HTTPS.
It also allows the default Home navigation to be overridden with custom text, for example by configuring `Home: /' in the dashboard's navigation.
Lastly, we have also fixed a lot of bugs, too many to introduce one by one this time.
These are what we've been up to this time, thanks for reading and following along. If you have any questions or suggestions please don't hesitate to tell us. See you next week!