Hello, dear users of Telescope! This week was intense — we made a bunch of cool infra updates, moved to AWS, tweaked the way we store time-series data and how we work with database replicas. Telescope's infrastructure became more and more robust and reliable, and I will happily share the details of it soon.
This week was intense — I made a bunch of cool infra updates, moved Telescope to AWS, tweaked the way Telescope stores and handles time-series data and how it works with database replicas. Telescope's infrastructure became more and more robust and reliable, and I will happily share the details of it soon.
Unfortunately, Telescope also experienced several issues this week (including a 5-hour shutdown on Sunday), but I made sure all these problems won't ever happen again.
What else does Telescope have to share today?
#1: Statistics (again!)
It's one of my favourite features, and it became even better.
Statistics page now shows you not only the number of views, but also referrers and countries, and it also looks beautiful on mobile devices. Several more improvements to statistics will be made soon — for example, it will become possible to see the number of unique visitors and use some custom filters and date ranges. And that's exactly why I needed to change the way Telescope stores all the statistics-related data in the database.
Unfortunately, the changes led to old stats becoming unavailable. It's too late to change it, but trust me — the new updates and the efficiency of all the operations over the stats are worth the price.
Just a small reminder — statistics will become a Pro feature since the 1st of September. You still have three days to check how beautiful it is.
#2: Editor improvements
The editor is definitely the component of Telescope I am proud of. It's fast, efficient, it works well on mobile devices (thus eliminating any need in separate mobile application), and it's just beautiful. And it's becoming better!
And it's becoming better!
First of all, the new version of Telescope Editor features reorganized menus. It means it's now possible to perform almost all the operations over your stories from the project page.
Secondly, there is an "Editor settings" option available now. It currently only allows you to change the behaviour of Enter key, but even this small feature will be important for mobile users.
And, of course, there were some layout fixes made this week, and I hope editing became more pleasant overall.
#3: Are you ready for custom domains?
Custom domains feature is also one of the reasons why we needed to migrate from one cluster to another, and why we had several stability issues this week.
Fortunately, almost all the technical issues are already solved. It means this feature will be finished in a week or so. I already started testing it and even made a short demonstration of how it will work.
And here is how.
In three (or even two) easy steps:
1. You will need to add a CNAME for your domain like I did:
2. You will need to link the hostname to your project/blog from Telescope Editor.
3. Done! This is how it works for my beautiful blog (don't forget to subscribe to it): https://battlefield.alwx.me/
That's it!
That was the short overview of some of the new features.
Don't forget to subscribe to this blog and let me know what you think of Telescope by writing to hi@telescope.ac. Enjoy the rest of the week, and see you soon! Update #6 is going to be huge.