Hello friends and family,
As you all know, I’ve been hard at work since July 2016 seeing Stridr come to fruition. While I will continue my efforts, I am pausing any money being put toward the project. As of today, stridr.social is going on maintenance mode until I can squash all of the bugs and optimize a lot of the efficiency issues with the website. Continue reading to see what’s in store.
Faster loading and more transparency with wait times
Spinning Loading Icon
Stridr loads a lot of data from a lot of places. This inherently takes a long time to process. Some of this processing time is inevitable, but some of it can be improved on Stridr’s end. I will be working to decrease loading times, and to design the website in a way that will be more transparent about things that may take some time to do.
Chronological Content Feed
As platforms get bigger, they try their best to bias your feed based on what they think you’ll like. Sometimes it works for the better, sometimes it doesn’t. Based on feedback from Stridr’s registered users, the all-in-one content feed will be chronological to give an unbiased view of all of the things you follow.
A Facelift for the User Profile
The user profile is currently a place that shows your friends everything you like on social media. While this will still be an option, the user profile will soon show all of the posts you’ve made across social media. This feed keeps up-to-date with your feeds, so when you make a new post or delete an old post, these changes will be reflected in your profile. Additionally, this profile feed can be curated, so you can delete specific posts synced from your feed if you so choose.
Tag Based Search Feed
Stridr is all about connecting you with social media content that matters to you. A tag-based search feed for social media posts will soon be available so you can easily find what people are talking about, all in one place. This will be in addition to the regular search function, which is presently used for finding social media pages.
Enhanced Security
A driving factor behind taking Stridr completely offline was due to a security flaw in the way that Stridr makes requests from the supported social media platforms. In its current state, the flaw could not be exploited without access to Stridr’s application secrets to the nine supported platforms. While these secrets are very safe, I was not comfortable exposing Stridr’s users to the risk of a single source of failure.
This, combined with rather substantial performance issues, and a lack of users to justify paying for server expenses all led to the decision to take Stridr down temporarily. If I were more than one person, “we” would address all of these issues without having to shut the website down, but I am one person with obligations to family, my health, friends, and classes.
Conclusion
I look forward to re-releasing Stridr into a more usable, feature-rich website that I can be proud to have you use. Keep an eye on this blog for more updates, and thank you all for your enthusiastic support. Making you all proud is a huge motivator for me, so thank you so much for all the cheerleading!
