Kanibot Version 38 - Development update

It has been nearly 8 months since my last major update to Kanibot. Even though I was doing some internal updates and maintenance, I did not push any major features or changes to the website as such. Today I had some time to go through the code and do some code refactoring. I'm glad that I was able to improve some of the functionalities and make the notifications faster now.

I have some cool features in the mind for the next few weeks. I now have someone with whom I'm able to share my workload on Hive. This makes it easier for me to focus a little bit more on my personal projects and innovations around Hive. Most likely there will be some updates every week or the other I believe. Let's see how it goes. I'm planning to make a post whenever some features can be taken and I can talk about those features. This is one such article where a few sets of features went live on Kanibot.

Improvements to authentication and authorization

I wanted to do some improvements to the authentication flow on the website. The main reason is that I'm bringing in some new features to the website which can be interesting for many users. In order to facilitate the new web features, the website authentication flow needed an update. I cannot explain what exactly I did for security reasons but the security has been enhanced. Most importantly the website will not ask you to log in every time you refresh the page. The session will be available for a longer period of time and should also work well when the page is refreshed.

In addition to that, I have refactored the code and made many things simple. A lot easier for me to manage. This will help me modularize and add more features in the future. This refactoring was the major part for me.

Hivesigner has been disabled

For some reason, Hivesigner was having issues with the website and I have disabled it. I know this is not good news for the mobile users but hopefully, I will restore hivesigner back in one of the releases in the future. There are also plans to introduce other login methods as well like Hive Author something like a smart lock. I will work on that when I get the time. But for now, this is a low-priority item for me.

Hive notifications should be faster now

This was one of the features requested by some of the users. When someone is making a post or comment or vote, it takes some time for Kanibot to send notifications. The reason was that we were using the condenser API to get the block data and process the notifications. I have now changed it to block_api and this is pretty much instant. The only problem with this is sometimes the post details are not fully updated. But as of now, there are no notifications that would immediately need the post details.

This particular feature will improve the user experience to a greater extent. When someone is posting, voting, or commenting, the notifications would be pretty much instant because of this API change.

New About section on the website

I have introduced a new About section on the website. The About section has the list of all the updates and releases I have done to Kanibot so far. I wanted to use this page as a placeholder to add more information in the future as well. Better to have a separate About section on the website directly than to have the post links in the footer of the development update articles. I will keep updating this section as and when there are updates to the website and bot and especially when there is a post written on the same.

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If you like what I'm doing on Hive, you can vote me as a witness with the links below.

Vote @balaz as a Hive Witness
Vote @kanibot as a Hive Engine Witness

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