Reworking the SteemMakers website

Working hard behind the scenes

The last couple of weeks we haven't been very vocal about what we are doing at SteemMakers but that doesn't mean nothing is happening. The last update showed that there is a lot of potential in the move to vue.js and typescript. Personally I'm currently working on converting the complete site to a single page application.

Single page applications

A Single Page Application (SPA) is a site where the page never reloads completely. To the user it is one page on which everything happens. All communication happens under the skin. Obviously the user gets new information as he navigates around but it's always small bits that get updated and never a complete page.

With traditional sites an action on the site completely reloads the page. A lot of elements you saw before get loaded again. With a SPA only the elements that change get reloaded. That saves a lot of data traffic and reaction time. And because only a small part of the data is necessary for an update the load on the server is smaller.

Most SPA's use a strict separation between a frontend and a backend/server. Communication is done with a JSON api. The big advantage is that a large portion can be reused when a second application, for example a native app.

What's changing for you

At the moment there's not much change for you as a user. The current developments are not live yet. The site will keep the same look and feel. But it will allow us to add more and more features at a faster pace in the future. Sometimes it's necessary to stake a step back before moving forward.

A sneak peek of the previews

Small improvents can already been seen in the blog previews as shown in the image below. On the left you can see how the blog overview currently looks. On the right how the current testsite looks. There's not one fix but multiple small updates. All articles have an image preview, the text preview has been updated, the author and post date have been added, ... The biggest feature of this update however is that it allows us to more easily add other features. Think tags, vote button, ...

This is currently live for testing at: https://www.steemmakers.com/test.php#/Blog

What will come next?

Some further code restructuring is necessary and the articles themselves still need to be added. Once that has been done going live will come closer.

Help us out

Anyone interested is free to join and help out, all work is available on Github. More information can be found on our website www.steemmakers.com, have a look and join us on Discord!