Website Update Announcements (Updated: February 7, 2025) • Page 11

Minor aesthetic and bigger behind the scenes changes to the share page.

Details: https://chorus.fm/changelog/

 

The Rank Anything and Share Music pages now both have Dark Mode themes. These activate based on your system theme and are available to everyone.

https://chorus.fm/changelog/

 

Added a small, but often requested feature, to display a message on blocked quotes in posts:

https://chorus.fm/changelog/#09082023

 

Added a "singles review" banner and sort to the reviews page: https://chorus.fm/changelog/#09182023

 

Added a sort feature on author pages: https://chorus.fm/changelog/#09202023

 

Couple minor fixes to the sort option and added the clear button to tag pages + the homepage: https://chorus.fm/changelog/#09212023

 

https://chorus.fm/changelog/#01152024

The search results page now returns the full (above fold) article, complete with formatting.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

I added a new “Embed Preferences” option for forum accounts. Due to bad management over at Twitter, there’s been issues with their embed code crashing the browser if there are too many of them on one page. This new option can be found on your Preferences page, and there are three options:

1. Always Auto Embed: This is the default option and how the website has always worked up until now.
2. Do Not Auto Embed: This will disable all of the embeds in the forum. You will see a small placeholder on posts where embeds used to display. Clicking, or tapping, the placeholder will load the hidden media.
3. Do Not Auto Embed on Mobile: This will hide the embeds only when you are browsing the forum on a mobile device. This way you can still see full embeds on a desktop computer, but save your phone the stress.

This should work with all multimedia embeds on the website (social media posts, videos, etc.) and if you see any issues or bugs, please let me know.

 

Update: I’m playing around with it on in the absurdist Twitter thread and still seeing the browser crash at times.

I’ll need to explore more, it's better, but not perfect, so I'll keep exploring.

Update #2: I think I fixed the bug I was seeing. This should be much better as soon as it propagates.

Update #3: Pretty funny how ridiculously fast the website is on mobile with these disabled like this, it flies.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• Fixed some bugs with the new deactivate embed feature to better conserve browser resources. Now, with the “do not embed” setting on embeds do not load in the browser at all until activated by the user (by clicking/tapping the placeholder). This greatly improves performance.
• Restyled the placeholder to be a little more button-like to make it more obvious it can be tapped or clicked on and to differentiate how it looks from the “blocked user” feature.
• Added the feature to all of the auto-embeds that are active on the website, and optimized their code, so that when the option is turned on it works exactly how one would expect and removes all embeds. The only media that is still shown automatically with this feature turned on are inline images. The forum feels incredibly fast, especially on mobile, with this turned on and it is now my recommended way to browse the forum.
• Cleaned up and removed a bunch of old code around previous embeds that no longer work. Going forward, the media that can be automatically embedded includes: Apple Music, Bandcamp, Giphy, Imgur, Instagram, SoundCloud, Spotify, Threads, Twitch, Twitter/X, Vimeo, and YouTube.

If you like this feature and want to help support continued development on this website, please consider becoming a supporting member. No ads makes the website even faster, but it also allows me to spend time working on these kinds of projects.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

Fixed the issue where page titles and links were not showing properly for trending posts in the homepage carousel or in the popular posts section in article footers.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

I've added Bluesky auto-embeds to the forum. Read all about it at the link above.

A huge thank you to to all supporters for supporting the website and giving me the ability to spend time on new features like this. If you want to continue to see new features added to the website, please become a supporting member.

Update: You can also now add your Bluesky username on your profile:

https://forum.chorus.fm/account/contact-details

Just add the username portion in the field, for example: jasontate.bsky.social‬

Update #2:

• On Bluesky users can select to have their posts private unless you're logged in and viewing it on the website itself, this (obviously) will break the embed. This is now handled more gracefully. If you click the message you'll be taken to the website to see the post.
• Updated a few aesthetic tweaks to the embeds so they appear smoother and the "loading" state looks better and more natural. And I fixed a slight size issue with the embeds on mobile.

 

This rules. Thank you!

 

yayy thanks!

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

After rolling out the new Bluesky embeds last week, I wanted to take another pass at the Twitter/X auto-embeds to use some of what I did on the Bluesky version to see if I couldn’t improve these as well. The new version should start rolling out to all users now. You’ll know when you have the new version when the logo changes from the bird to the X logo (if the dumbass owner is really stick with that, I guess it’s time to go with it).

These should be significantly faster and tax the browser far less than the previous ones. I think it may even help fix some of the “page refresh” issues we were having when the browser would crash from too many embedded Tweets. And, these should now also handle errors better as well (if a tweet/post gets deleted, the URL is incorrect, or the X account gets banned, there will be text on the post explaining why it didn't load).

Everything else should work as expected, just better. Dark mode will work based on your forum preference (if you’re a supporting member) or will default to whatever your system setting is otherwise.

If you like this feature and want to help support continued development on this website, please consider becoming a supporting member. It's because of supporting members that I can sit down and take time to do projects like this.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• Continuing my productive week of projects: I’ve converted our Threads auto-embeds to now also use the new backend I developed with the Bluesky embeds.
• I also made a couple aesthetic tweaks to the Twitter/X embeds so that the dark mode placeholder better matches the color of the Twitter/X dark mode theme. And I matched the loading fade in animation with the Bluesky and Threads embeds so that all three look and behave the same.

Update (2:41 PM):

• And Instagram embeds have now been upgraded as well. They now better support Reels, various Instagram URLs schemes, and use the same codebase as the other embeds to be cleaner and faster.

 

• And one final update for my week: Mastodon auto-embeds are now live! The nerd in me is pretty excited about how these turned out and work. They should handle any Mastodon server that allows embedding (if one doesn't work, let me know and I will look into it), and, like Twitter/X embeds, they will use a Dark Mode theme if you have it selected (as a supporting member) or default to your system theme. These also use all of the same backend as the previous new auto-embeds, so they should look consistent and load fast. Please let me know if you see any bugs or issues. Because these are brand new, and because of the nature of how Mastodon/the Fediverse works, there may be edge cases I have not thought of or seen before.

If you like this feature and want to help support continued development on this website, please consider becoming a supporting member. It's because of supporting members that I can sit down and take time to do projects like this.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

Some Mastodon auto-embed updates:

• The entire “post” is now clickable, to mimic other embed functionality. This will not impact any links in the post, those will all still work as expected. Same with the links on the avatar and username, those will both still go to the user’s Mastodon profile page. Thanks @dylan for the suggestion.
• I now trim any long URLs in the post to be only 30 characters.
• Link embed/previews now work to show a little information about the link included in the post.
• Replies, boosts, and favorites counts are now displayed on the post itself in the footer.
• Fixed image attachments to better work in the container and scroll if multiple exists.
• Added a “verified” badge if the account has a verified link on its profile.
• Minor aesthetic tweaks for light and dark mode to look a little cleaner.
• Fixed error handling to better “fail” if a post can’t be found.
• Tweaked caching to better serve the cached version of the post, faster.

Example of the update:

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• Fixed Instagram embeds in the forums to include the Instagram captions.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

I fleshed out a feature we already had on the website but wasn’t being used to it’s full potential: photo galleries. I redesigned them so that they are easier for me to post and have a more “Instagram-like” feel to them when browsing the website. They now appear inline with posts and have a fun carousel feature to easily browse through multiple images. Each image is clickable to open up a full screen version of the image, and you can continue scrolling through the gallery in the “large” version of the gallery as well.

I’ve also brought this feature to the author blog pages. I wanted a way to be able to post “photo blogs” on my blog and to use it in a similar way as how I’ve used Instagram in the past year. As I try and move away from social media I want to still have places to share and post photos if only for myself to look back on. These photo blogs have all the same features as the regular galleries and the blog pages, which means they can easily be sorted from the author page. I’ve also added a new feature to all blog posts that show author specific tags on the bottom of each post. Since blog posts never get imported into the forum for comments, the “community” and “comment count” portion on the posts were being wasted. However, this “blog tag” section will have the tags for the post but clicking on them will show you just the posts tagged with that tag from the author. The idea here is I can tag posts with things like “monthly memories” or “vinyl collection” and keep them organized and easily be able to link to them, or for people to see all the posts in that collection from the author. I’m excited about this development and look forward to posting more photos on my blog in the near future.

• I made a fix to the main RSS feed to make sure author blogs and photo blogs are not included. So you’d need to subscribe to an individual author’s RSS feed to see these posts.
• I made a change so that in search and on any “tag” page posts that are blogs get a prefix to easily identify what are blog posts vs main website posts on these pages.
• I fixed a style issue with “clear sort” in Dark Mode.
• I fixed a search issue where this page (Release Notes) was showing the entire page in the results.
• I fixed an infinite scroll issue related to galleries not loading correctly.

If you like this feature and want to help support continued development on this website, please consider becoming a supporting member. It's because of supporting members that I can sit down and take time to do projects like this.

 

Tweaked the author pages on mobile to now display the “social media” section and “recommended” section in collapsable/expandable menus. This lets the content come up higher on the page on mobile while still keeping it accessible.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• Fixed some issues on the admin page and made this release notes page easier for me to update,
• After rolling out the photo blog feature, I figured … why not just add a micro blog feature as well? Over the past few years I have basically stopped using text based social media. Mostly because I found the context collapse overwhelmingly negative and I didn’t enjoy posting to the entire world. Beyond just the owners of these platforms being ridiculous, I found that, as someone who has spent a great deal of time writing online, I don’t enjoy writing in that way on those platforms. But, I do sometimes have random thoughts and things that are good for that “mini” format. So, I added the feature to the personal blogs here so I’d have a place to do just that. The mini blogs appear only on author pages, they are only surfaced in search if that search starts from an author page. And they can be sorted just like everything else on the author page. I used a similar visual style for what I developed for the Mastodon embeds in the forum and created a simple-ass Shortcut to be able to quickly post text or photos to my blog. The plan is to try and use this more going forward (and use social media less). We’ll see how it works out, but at the very least it was a fun evening project.
• Fixed an issue with the main website’s favicon changing and being weird. Mobile Safari holds on to these for a very long time, but did what I could to fix it going forward.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• Allowlisted a bunch of NewsBlur and other RSS reader IP addresses so they can reach our RSS feeds. If you ever see RSS feeds not updating that should with new content, please reach out to me so I can look at fixing.
• Connected my blog posts to my forum profile so it will be updated when I post.
• To go with my new Photo Blog feature I wanted to have a way to easily post these not just from mobile (using an iOS Shortcut), but also from the desktop. And I wanted a way to do it without uploading the photos to our media gallery (I want to keep that clean with photos for the main website), but still using our CDN. So, I built a new WordPress posting block. I put all the photos in a Dropbox folder and Hazel uploads them to our CDN and puts them in folders to match the current date. Then I just add the photo blog block in WordPress and the block pre-populates with today’s date and shows all the photos that are in that folder. I can select the photos from the dropdown menu to insert them into the post. Select the Photo Blog category, Gallery post type, click Publish. Done. Simple and easy to upload any number of photos to the CDN, keep them organized, but stay outside of the WordPress media gallery and still give me access to post them from the publisher. The Shortcut does something similar, it puts the image in Dropbox, then prompts me for a title, post caption, and any additional tags I want to add. Then it automatically grabs the image(s) from the CDN, puts them in the post, adds the caption, and posts it to the correct category with all the right options filled out. The whole process takes seconds to do from my phone.