Hello, dear Telescope users! It's end of July, and it seems to be a perfect time to present a new set of Telescope features.
#1: Ability to set your own password (finally!)
This is one of the features a lot of people asked me for. It seems like nobody likes the lack of the ability to use your password, so I decided to fix it. It's also worth saying that the login popup now works correctly with password managers, and it's also something a lot of people asked me for.
Since now, you can set up a custom password and use it instead of your backup phrase to log in. However, the backup phrase is still there, and you can use it, too.
One of the possible problems with passwords is that people tend to forget them if they don't use a password manager. E-mail can usually help to remind a password. Telescope doesn't have your e-mail, which makes the process of restoring your password much more complicated. I decided to use backup phrases for these purposes, so make sure you have your backup phrase written down somewhere.
The process is not ideal yet — there will be more fixes and improvements to the login process available soon.
#2: New landing page
What's good about the new landing page is that it looks cleaner and nicer, includes several more buttons, and gives potential customers a better understanding of what the product is about. I hope you like it!
#3: Roadmap
The policy of Telescope is to be as open as possible. That's why I decided to make the roadmap publicly accessible. Moreover, you can easily open it from the Telescope's landing page since now.
The roadmap has dozens of tasks already, but there will be more of them added in the next days. The idea is to keep these boards updated to make users assured that Telescope is in active development and it's not going to disappear soon.
#4: JSON API to get some basic information about projects/blogs
As I said before, one of the goals is to make Telescope as open as possible. That's exactly why we now have a beautiful and simple API that allows you to get the contents of your blog in JSON format. It's not documented yet, but you can use it the following way:
Given that https://telescope.ac/battlefield is your blog, you can now add ".json" to it and get its content in JSON format. Like that: https://telescope.ac/battlefield.json
Of course, it's far from being a complete API, but it's a good first step, and it perfectly demonstrates the intentions. More public API methods will be added in the next months!