forum Improved: Redesigned template editor and improved page questions, plus tons more
Started by @andrew health_and_safety flash_onAdmin
tune

people_alt 105 followers

@andrew health_and_safety flash_onAdmin

A big ol' release just went out (the first of the year!) that was just big enough to write up a whole post about what it contains. If you'd like, you can check out what's new in full at this link.

Here's the bulleted list for you busybodies, though:

  • You'll now see questions about your notebook pages around the site. If you're looking at your list of characters, you'll be asked a question about one of those characters. If you're looking at your locations tagged "Cool Place", the question generated for that page will be about one of those locations with that tag. If you filter your notebook to a specific universe, all of your questions will be about pages in that universe.
  • You can now link to other pages in these question prompts by typing @ and selecting a page to link, the same way you can when editing a page normally.
  • The system that generates questions about your pages is now significantly faster. Pages will load faster across the site, and this lets me experiment with new kinds of questions much easier.
  • There's now a new section of the data vault for your image uploads. It'll list every image you've uploaded, what page its attached to, how much bandwidth it's using, and let you delete it from there if you'd like. Visit the data vault here.
  • There are more fields for you to fill out on your profile. You can now display your favorite quote, inspirations, other names, and a link to a website next to the existing fields for your bio, favorite author, book, genre, and personal interests. Edit your profile here.
  • You can now upload an image for your avatar directly to Notebook.ai. You don't need to use Gravatar for this anymore (but we'll fall back on Gravatar if you don't have one uploaded here). These avatars don't subtract from your account bandwidth.
  • The template editor for all of your pages has been redesigned. It should be significantly faster and easier to use now. There's also an additional 50 more icons to choose from when customizing your categories.
  • The template editor can now suggest additional categories and fields for your pages. This is a new AI system available to everyone that is currently learning (so there may not be many suggestions yet), but it'll only improve over time. You can see suggestions when adding new categories and fields in the editor.
  • You can now export your notebook in YML format. There's some software out there that uses YML (not a lot, but some), so having this available could be convenient for some people. It's also somewhat human-readable, which might make a nice outline format for some others.
  • Recently-deleted documents are now available in your recycle bin. You can recover them like any other notebook page for up to several days after deletion, or delete them permanently.
  • The "recently-edited pages" dropdown has been redesigned as a sidebar. Click the icon in the top-right of your screen next to the search icon to see it yourself. A sidebar now pops out to let you quickly jump between pages you've recently edited. Hover over any name to see how long ago it was edited. Premium users can see the latest 20 pages and free users can see the latest 10, but if this doesn't cause much database load I'll probably increase both later. Gotta be careful since it's on every single page load. :)
  • Items, Sports, and Flora pages have had their colors and icons adjusted. They were hard to read with the old colors, and should be better now. The new icons also look nicer. :)
  • A bunch of other bugs have been fixed. I've been hard at work mostly fixing bugs over the past month. Lots to do with deleting your account (because, admittedly, I'm always a bit nervous testing how well that feature works!) and deleting pages that had images uploaded to them, among probably two dozen others. I think I also fixed the double-linking bug (where the same pages would link twice) in most situations, but there might still be some where it is happening. Please report any and all bugs you see with the link in the sidebar so I can categorize them and keep them organized while I knock them out one by one.

Oof, quite a bit of stuff there.

A few other things of note:

  • I meant to include a way to switch fields between text and page-linking in the template editor, but it's very difficult to get right. This is still in progress, but I wanted to get the redesigned template editor out now so people can at least be using it.

  • I have a personal goal to write a short story every week in 2020 (I had a lot of fun doing this in 2010 and 2015) and I'll be trying to write them all in the document editor here, so I expect that I'll be pumping a lot of updates into that very soon. If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the editor, I always love to hear them!

Anyways, happy new years everyone! Thank you so much for being along for the ride on Notebook.ai, and I hope the site is treating you well. I know there's always room for improvement (everywhere), but I hope you stick around while I keep making the site better and better. <3

@standingondesks Know-it-all

What an awesome update! My only nitpick is that now we have four page types with very similar shades of orange (I can't see any difference between Magics and Sports), but obviously that's only an aesthetic concern. Love the prompts popping up everywhere though :D

@faltering_through pets

Holy hecc that was a ride my dude !! But thanks !!
I just came back after a short hiatus and i was super hella stoked to see all of these new additions!!

But dude, really, thank you-
For all the work you put into this, making this site easier and more entertaining to use, fixing all these bugs that pop outta no where >:0

It must be hella work and we love da hecc out of you for putting your time into this fam !!
Keep up the good work, i appreciate and admire you so much, i just got no words-