Website Update Announcements (Updated: March 7, 2025) • Page 12

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• I fixed a few issues related to legacy code on memberships expiring and how that’s handled when someone tries to login on the main website.
• I re-factored the main website code to load faster and now serve a better cached version for logged out, regular, users, as well as logged in supporting members. The pages for supporters should be significantly faster.
• I cleaned up some redundant code for how the main website and forum talk to each other to be more secure, faster, and handle the new caching system for members.
• I sped up how the main website sees and handles “dark mode,” for users that have it selected, so that it will load much faster and avoid any white flashes. It also now works far faster when swapping between themes. If you currently have “automatic” selected, you may want to select a different theme (light or dark) and then go back to automatic if you’re seeing any issues.
• I removed Google Analytics on the main website. I stopped looking at those stats a long time ago and I’m having second thoughts about just how much “tracking” I want on the website in general. I’m going to see how I feel, or if I miss it, and might end up removing Google Analytics entirely from the website in the future.
• I made a few tweaks to how videos are displayed and loaded in news posts.

Please let me know if you see any issues. This was one of the bigger code changes I've done on the main website in a while.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• I fixed a few minor display issues with image lazy-loading.
• I fixed multiple issues with membership only pages on the main website so that the links work correctly and are better structured.
• I fixed an issue where notifications for signed-in supporters were not showing quite right on mobile and added the notification count inside the mobile menu as well.
• I fixed some inconsistent spacing on post headers on mobile to better align across the site.
• My new code/cache changes for optimization seems to be working even better than expected so I’ve removed the old Auto Optimize plugin entirely.
• I added a default featured image if one isn’t included on purpose (or by accident) for posts.
• I had plans to code something else for the website tonight and then I got distracted with a wild idea. So, I wrote an easter egg for the website for no other reason than I wanted to do something fun.
• I tweaked the REGEX pattern to better find albums and songs shared in my micro blog.
• Added a way for my micro and photo blog shortcut to force a cache refresh on my blog after a post.
• Add a fix so that links in my micro blog posts will be linked correctly in the RSS feed.
  

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• I wrote a very simple page tracking script, that I control completely, to now handle how our "Trending" and "popular posts" features work around the website. Before, I was using the WordPress API to check their stats tracking once an hour, download the most popular pages, and then use that data to display the popular posts around the website. Instead, I now store that pageview information locally. The only thing that is tracked is what article was viewed and the timestamp. No information about the person viewing the article is tracked at all. No information is tracked anywhere else on the main website except these views. The log file keeps only seven days worth of data at a time (to populate both the trending within 24 hours and 7 days filters). I've also now removed the WordPress tracking pixel and javascript from the main website. And, with this, after already having removed Google Analytics from the main website, I'm pulling that code off the forum as well. Now I will only use the forum's built in analytics to look at stats (number of posts, likes, registrations, etc.). I've made this decision because I've long stopped using Google Analytics to even look at basic stats. I write the website for myself, first and foremost, and don't like any outside influence or wanting to feel any pull to chase stats or engagement. I know that well over a million unique people visit this website each month because I can see that through Cloudflare, I can see the thousands of subscribers to the newsletter, and I can see basic stats on the forum. That's good enough for me. And, I've grown increasingly annoyed with just how much data Google collects. They don't need me and my website feeding even more into it. Those that are not supporters will still see ads, which Google runs a good portion of, so that version of the tracking will (unfortunately) remain since I have no control over that. This is yet another reason I highly recommend becoming a member and having all the ads removed; the speed difference alone is remarkable.
• I made a minor tweak to the relative dates to properly handle plural vs singular time increments.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

• I fixed an issue with certain YouTube playlists not working correctly in our lightbox player.
• My photo blogs will now use the first photo as the image when shared to my social media pages.
• All music share pages will now use the album art (if it exists) when being shared on social media or in messaging apps that support the meta tags. For example, if you share an album in Messages it will display properly.
• Cleaned up some extraneous and outdated meta tags in page headers.

And more.

 

Release Notes • chorus.fm

I added a new feature to our search results pages that will "highlight" the key searched for words in the results to better show you why those articles were returned. Clicking into an article will then also keep those words highlighted on the page as well (for three minutes before gracefully fading out).

 

I think I found, and fixed, the issue with some images not uploading/being attached/shown in posts.

(New phones are taking massive resolution images. Like 5000+ x 4000+. How the upload and image script was processing these was causing memory failures with these giant images. The new fix, if it works right, should first resize the image to a more reasonable size while still keeping good resolution, and then upload/process it. It worked with my test images; fingers crossed it doesn't mess anything else up.)