0.7.3 Is Released

First-time users have told us they often have issues with logging onto HubPress after initially configuring the blog. Anthonny wanted to support new users better, and we decided that Gitter was the best product fit for HubPress.

You’ll find the embedded Gitter client in the bottom-right of each screen in the product.

Use it to reach out to Anthonny and I, and get support with HubPress.

When you log onto your updated version of HubPress for the first time, you’ll notice a slight delay as all your posts are synchronised over.

After this process completes, you’ll find subsequent logins to be much faster than on 0.6.0. This is because subsequent logins do not trigger a resync, and rely on the local storage. Most HubPress users are solo bloggers, so synchronising posts each time you log in seemed like a waste of time.

If you do share your blog instance with other bloggers, you can force a resync in the Posts view so posts written by your blogging team are synchronised over.

The way we handle publishing has been reworked and has made publising times for a 90 post blog reduce from 4 minutes to about 40 seconds in our tests.

The bottleneck before was the way HubPress committed files to your blog’s repository: each change was a separate commit. This caused excessive commit history in your blog and made large blogs struggle to publish quickly.

Post operations are now batched into logical groups. There should only be about four commits per publish, not hundreds like some larger blogs were experiencing.

Anthonny made the decision to move away from a React/Redux and material-ui to Vue/VueX and Semantic UI. This move allowed Anthonny to actually develop HubPress, not resolve dependency hell each time he tried to do development.

In the Posts view you’ll find a new Filter function that lets you search for keywords and textual strings in posts. This will help those of you with large posts lists to find an old post or a post with keywords in it. Perhaps you can use the feature to search for and update your old tech posts with new info? Let us know what you think about this addition.

There is now a team page that explains a bit about us as well. You access this through the Navigation menu.

In the Navigation menu, you’ll also find links to PayPal and Gratipay that let you send a quick thank-you in the form of a pre-paid beer or coffee (or Pizza if you’re feeling super generous).

We’d really appreciate you giving this some thought and taking action if you can: it only takes a few minutes.

This release was a maintenance release to fix up some early-adopter bugs discovered with HTTPS mixed content in themes and an ld+json bug. We also added back in some themes that were excluded from the first release by accident.

Our thanks go out to the early adopters who raised bugs and helped us identify some issues with themes and posts.