Released
It took me nearly 4 months, but at last, a new major version of the website is out! This is probably the largest update up until now, mainly because I got sidetracked a lot. Sorry about that.
The biggest thing in this big update is the long-awaited release of part 2 of the “gaze upon the stars” blog post! And when I say biggest, I really mean it, as it clocks in at a whopping 37 minutes of reading time. That equates to about 7,400 words (though I haven’t checked the exact word count). On top of that, part 1 has been revised and expanded a bit.
And if that’s not enough, blog posts now feature a built-in comment section! This is done by displaying GitHub discussions through giscus. As such, you will need a GitHub account to comment on them. Both “gaze upon the stars” blog posts should have an example comment from me in there, as pictured below:
Don’t ask me why it defaults to this horrible font on Linux…
The website’s custom audio visualizer has been updated quite a bit. The most important changes have
been listed below. Not only that, you can now try out this visualizer with ANY audio file* by
heading to the new visualizer playground page!
*: Assuming your
browser supports said audio file.
This is a new addition to the visualizer! It gives you plenty of information about the audio volume, such as:
The volume meter and its parts.
Of course, the audio and video players that display those visualizers have been updated, too. For instance, the pop-up menu now contains a slider that lets you change the playback speed.
You can also use keyboard shortcuts to adjust said playback speed. Speaking of which, when you use one of these shortcuts, a little indicator will now pop up to let you know what you just did. This also applies to mouse and touch actions.
I know, I still need to add a help menu displaying the various shortcuts. You can reference a list of YouTube’s shortcuts for now, since they should be mostly the same. This website doesn’t use all of them, obviously.
Try out these changes here:
The default volume has been increased to 100% for now. In an upcoming version, I’ll add a preference that lets you change this. I also fixed various bugs related to these players, such as media refusing to load after a page transition. I have no clue what caused this, it just seemingly started happening some time between the last version and this one.
The website now features a list of versions and their changes, which can be accessed at any time by clicking the version number at the bottom of the left sidebar. But who am I kidding, you already knew that, because you’re browsing them right now. Or maybe you clicked that banner up top.
Anyway, these version pages are generated automatically based on Git tags and commit history. It also allows for custom release notes, which you’re currently reading!
There have been a lot more smaller changes. For instance, the table of contents has also been moved to its own dedicated sidebar on the right, and on large enough screens, you can now toggle these sidebars. Their state will be remembered as well!
Next up, style changes. One of these is that the various navigation bars have been given a new look in Immersive Mode, although said look is still subject to change. Horizontal rulers have also been stylized. And the last thing I want to mention, the immersive background has coloured stars now! Can you even tell?
Of course, there are many more of these changes that are not worth mentioning here, such as improved page load times. Check out the commit history below if you want to dive into the nitty-gritty.
Final changes for the stable 0.4.0 release.
<blockquote>, <Alert>, and the current version table.convert script to allow removing the audio stream, and refactor it a bit.giscus.ncurc.js to match the other config files.Part 2 of the "gaze upon the stars" blog post should now be mostly finished.
convert script and add npm-check-updates as dev dependencynpm-check-updates as a dev dependency to create a type checked config file for it.consola and ansis packages in the convert script.style commitsstyle commit type and tweak some other type/scope texts.Avoids loading its corresponding script and styles if the page doesn't have a table of contents.
Move table of contents to avoid making them too small when there are more sidebar items.
DurationFormat polyfill as ES moduleThis significantly improves page load times.
0.4.0-alpha.6 and skip config files when checking copyright headerstools.resetPreferences).Add changelogs to the website based on Git tags and commit history. Also some style clean-up.
Prevent tapping to play/pause when the video player controls are hidden, and move fullscreen code.
sass-embeddedMake various improvements to the audio visualizers, media player shortcuts and related styles.
Use git for checking the current branch, and add version information to the website.
Fix meta tags erroneously pointing to the main website in development builds, and add a little DEV badge next to the site logo.
Add an unfinished draft of part 2 of the "gaze upon the stars" blog post. Also change and fix some things that I felt were needed while writing, along with some other things.