What's New In November at Bloggie

Another month goes by. After reached the peak of my nerd life at Blizzcon 2018 and completed one of my bucket list, there are a lot of things to be reflected upon. But first thing first, I'm gonna share some of the updates from Bloggie .

Title Capitalization

One of the trickiest things when it comes to writing a blog post is to come up with a good title that summarizes the points and draws the audience. Then the next trivial (or important, depending on your preference) task is to capitalize each word properly.

I do capitalize each word for almost all of my posts, like our previous monthly update "What's New in October at Bloggie". That had been a manual process. Sometimes I got the title right in the first place, sometimes I had to tweak it a few times and put the capitalization process in the end. That was a tedious task.

So I asked the question, "oh heck, I'm building a blogging platform, why I can't make it easier for myself?" Dogfooding is the essential part for us to build this service, the problems we encounter as writers are the problems we should be aware of.

And here we go: a little button to help you capitalize the title.

There two details I think worth to mention.

First, we made it an opt-in feature. While we tend to see more capitalized posts on the internet, there are people perfectly fine with the sentence case, some titles even read more natural in that form.

We respect each style. So instead of updating your title in the background and hitting you as a surprise, we made it a button that you need to click when you want capitalized letters.

Second, intuitive and convential capitalization.

We did quick research and followed the basic rules we found here. And on top of that, we added some programming conventions to make sure we don't mistakenly capitalize google.com into Google.com or API into Api.

Simply put, it should work just as you expected. If you do find something off, please do leave a comment and let us know. If you're interested in this topic now, be sure to check out this post on Medium: Making a case for letter case, was a good read.

(kudos to @omegachien's first contribution to Bloggie )

The glory performance

We engineers love performance. It's one of the most cheerful moments when we cut down a 5-seconds query into near-instant.

I tasted it this time.

Before	After

At Bloggie, we're using Rails ActiveStorage to handle image uploads. While the integration with Rails app was fantastically smooth, there are more and more quirks we bumped into. One of the hot issues is the little support of CDN.

And we suffered from it. We had to bypass every image handled by ActiveStorage from our CDN. (Learn more in this post.)

Until finally we experimented with one of many monkey patches people shared, although a mixed feeling, the solution worked amazingly.

Now it's almost awkward to look back. (More monkey patches are lining up )

Future Bloggie

There are more refinements here and there, but I'd leave it for you to discover and judge; I've used up more bandwidth than I expected .

We'll continue to rethink and redesign our editor to make it more intuitive and transparent to help you (and help us) with sharing the thoughts and learnings and ideas. CodeMirror is a powerful tool, there are way more room for improvement.

Until next time, see ya~