Hey everyone,
Today's post is all about the power of community feedback and the learning process that comes with it. I was reading a recent post from @friendlymoose: Hive needs better feeds! Let’s build a custom Discovery tool! about building discovery tools, and it, along with other feedback, highlighted some shortcomings in the curation tool I've been working on.
So, I dove back into the code to incorporate some of that great feedback. I wanted to share the changes I've made and what I learned along the way.
1. Freedom of Frontend with Hivel.ink
One of the first things I addressed was a great point: not everyone uses PeakD. My tool was previously hard-coding all post links to PeakD, which isn't ideal.
To fix this, all links now use hivel.ink. For those who don't know, it's a fantastic service that presents you with a choice of which Hive frontend you'd like to use to view a post. This makes the tool much more useful for everyone, regardless of their preferred site.
2. A Lesson Learned About Voting
Next, I tackled the "vote hearts." In the process, I learned an important technical lesson about how Hive Keychain handles voting. Unlike other transactions where you can leave the from field blank to use the default wallet user, you must specify which account is casting a vote.
Because of this, the vote hearts feature is now only available for logged-in users. This way, the application knows exactly which Hive account to call the vote from, making the feature reliable and functional.
3. At-a-Glance Post Freshness
While I was making changes, I also wanted to add a quick visual cue to help curators know how "fresh" a post is. The vote hearts are now color-coded:
- Red Hearts are for posts less than 24 hours old.
- Purple Hearts are for posts older than 24 hours but still within the 7-day vote payout window.
This should make it much easier to spot new content that you can still vote on.
A Look Ahead: What's Next?
Now that I've been able to incorporate this round of feedback, I have a much clearer picture of what features are still missing. I'll be trying to add some of the initially requested features soon, such as:
- Multiple choice filtering for accounts and tags (e.g., show posts from user A or user B).
- Negative filtering (e.g., "don't show me posts with the
gamingtag").
I have a lot on my plate at the moment, so I can't promise a timeline, but they are on my radar.
A huge thank you to everyone who provides feedback. It's what helps these tools grow and improve.
Enjoy and let me know what else it might need!: https://thecrazygm.com/hivetools/pct
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM