🦉 Owlstown Newsletter #55
Happy October, Owlstowners!
I haven’t sent a newsletter in about 3 months because I’ve been mostly working on the inner workings of Owlstown, such as security enhancements, speed improvements, and software updates. I didn’t post about them because I thought they’re not as “shiny” as user interface updates or as “pretty” as a new design theme. But I think that was a mistake.
From now on, I’m going to start including updates to the inner workings of Owlstown. By doing this, I hope you’ll learn more about how Owlstown works behind the scenes, and you can be rest assured that your academic websites are hosted and served in the best possible way.
Cheers,
Ian 🦉
BibTeX brackets in publication titles
Owlstown will now properly render publication titles that have BibTeX brackets. For example, if your publication title has the BibTeX string "Hello {World}!", it will appear in your Owlstown website as "Hello World!". Words surrounded by \emph{} will be rendered in italics.
Custom Links
You can now add custom links to your list of social links. Custom links are displayed with a letter icon of the first letter of the link.
Speed up site access
Accessing sites is now several milliseconds faster because I added indexing to subdomain values in sites.
Reduce Ruby memory usage with jemalloc
I just reduced the amount of server memory used by Owlstown. This means that Owlstown websites can respond to more requests. It also means that webpages will load faster.
IN PROGRESS: Inline editing
I’m working on a new UI that will allow you to make edits directly in the Preview panel of the Owlstown Editor. I think this will make the UI more intuitive. Plus, editing might be faster when there is less switching between panels.
Here’s a preview:
Questions for the community
I’m adding a section to ask you about things I’m considering adding to Owlstown. If you have ideas and thoughts about any of them, please respond to this newsletter. I’d love to hear from you.
Other ways to provide feedback?
I turned down the Owlstown Forum because it's not being used that much. People prefer to send feedback via email or DM. I'm considering other channels to receive feedback from. Do people use Reddit or Discord? Other tools?
Referrals?
Do you have friends/colleagues interested in making an academic website? Want to give them a gift to nudge them? Let me know and I’ll send you a discount code that you can share with them.