LegendKeeper 0.7.12 and a sneak peek at LK Community (Patreon)

Hi folks! I've got a handful of bugfixes for you today. 

* Fix bug causing duplicate to not duplicate tab hidden state.

* Fix bug causing template to not respect tab hidden state.

* Fix bug causing templates to be empty when they shouldn't be

* Fix hidden tabs appearing in search results.

* Fix bug causing articles to jump around in the sidebar after sorting.

* Fix color of loading skeleton in dark mode. Doot doot

* Fix templates sometimes not appearing after creation

What's next?

There are a ton of changes behind the scenes in this update. The past week or so I've been focusing on testing, refactoring, and streamlining the backend server. We are in the middle of revamping the entire Asset Manager (the place where your maps, images, and templates live) to be more robust. (The new version will feel more like dropbox than the tabbed mess it is now.) The asset manager will play a big role in a series of upcoming major updates, LegendKeeper Community. 

The Community updates will bring a community-wide space for sharing installable content modules, as well as more options for sharing your project publicly. The first iteration of Community will be limited to curated modules of high-quality, original content, and likely some freely available SRDs. We're hoping that Community will be the game-changer we think it's going to be: I'm excited to add SRDs to my projects with one click. 8) While Community will focus around shared content, I see no reason why it couldn't serve as a social showcase space as well, once public projects are enabled. If you've got any ideas for this, leave in the comments below!

Once v1 of Community is out, we'll move on to expanding LK's features with  knowledge graph management, timelines, and a more powerful atlas. Still haven't finalized the order we'll be tackling those in, but they are a couple major version numbers away so we have some time. 

Aaaaand in parallel with all of this, I'll be slowly making improvements to LK's server infrastructure and client, on the slow road to offline support. It's gonna be a challenge, but the more I think about it, the stronger my conviction that LK needs to work offline (and potentially have a desktop client). Obviously it's good to have access to any features at all, so true functionality will take priority, but at the same time, robustness like offline support/syncing is what will make LK here to stay. 

Nerd Stuff

OH, one more thing! I wanted to brag about the 0.7.10 update a couple weeks ago. I did a few performance tweaks that had a huge impact, and now I have enough data to share a few fast facts. Before 0.7.10, our p50 and p95* response times for requests were 107ms and 600ms. This was... okay-ish. 107ms isn't terrible, but 600ms is slooooow. The 0.7.10 update brought these metrics down to 23ms and 120ms respectively. Now that's much better. Most of LK's requests were sped up by a factor of 5x, with some speeding up even 50x. (Though to be fair... it was a bug I introduced that was slowing everything down. Oops!)

Thanks for reading!

Braden

* Shorthand for 50th percentile (median value) and 95th percentile. That is, if you ordered all requests (~50 million in a month) to LK and ordered them by request speed, and took the value at the 95% mark.