April 2021 update
Dear AstroBin user,
Every month I'm sending out updates on what's new on AstroBin. I hope you find this interesting!
Before I kick-off with what what is new on AstroBin this April, I want to mention again, for those who missed it, that this is a very special time for me (and, by extension, for us all).
Thanks to AstroBin's growth in 2020, and the trust of so many of you who bought the Ultimate membership tier, starting from May 2021, after ten and a half years of working on AstroBin on the side, I am finally able focus on AstroBin full-time after quitting my day job last month!
This is great news not only for me, as it's the coronation of a dream I have chased for 10 years, but for everybody: I have a lot of interesting things in the pipeline, and from now, AstroBin will continue improving at an accelerated pace!
Thank you so much again for your support!
The list of new things in April is not huge, as I was very busy wrapping up my day job, dealing with a higher than normal volume of user support requests, and doing some home renovations. But without further ado, here it goes.
Constellations
AstroBin now has support for constellations. You can explore all constellations, search images by constellation, and even sort your gallery (or that of others) by constellation.
Annoying issue with notifications solved
Due to a difficult-to-debug race condition between the AstroBin application servers, the background job worker servers, and the database, notifications for new images and new image revisions occasionally weren't going out, much to the dismay of the people affected.
After much head scratching head banging against the wall, I was able to figure it out and it doesn't seem to be happening anymore.
As I was making changes to the background job worker code, I also performed several infrastructure improvements to that part of AstroBin's architecture, which made background tasks more robust.
Static files are served from the CDN again
For a period of about a year, AstroBin's static files (JavaScript, stylesheets, background images, etc) had been served directly from the main webserver because of architectural limitations on the way AstroBin was being deployed.
This was not optimal because that's less performant than serving such assets from a geographically distributed content delivery network.
I fixed this and now the static files are delivered more properly and faster!
Fixed a few timezone issues
I went through all code on AstroBin that shows dates and times and unified everything to be displayed correctly with regard to timezones (whether you are logged in or not), and with a relative time delta (e.g. "3 hours ago") for everything more recent than a month ago.
The inability to "like" images, comments, and forum posts when your AstroBin Index is less than 1.0 has been removed
That was a relic of a different era, when Likes were a part of the IOTD/TP process. Luckily, that's not the case anymore, and there is no reason to artificially restrict new users from giving Likes freely. The limitation has been removed.
AliPay payments
Thanks to the work of 雅痞张, AstroBin is now available in Simplified Chinese. Please join me in thanking them, and tell your Chinese speaking friends! Thanks to this, visits to AstroBin from China grew 10x in April compared to previous months!
I added support for payments via AliPay, which enables many Chinese users to purchase a membership.