Welcome back to more Patron diarists!! I won't list you all because you'll show up on the Latest Updates on the front page if you want to be found 😀
I can't begin to find the words to say how I feel about seeing so many people coming back. I'm flabberghasted at how many of you didn't like the WordPress system!! I should have done this years ago then!
But I probably wasn't in the right space then. The technology probably wasn't either to be fair. That's why I went with WordPress - it was established and worked - and has a huge number of people contributing code which meant I didn't need to.
Upcoming Changes
So, I've mostly figured out how I can get images into entries without them having to be stored in the database. The editor used here embeds images as an encoded string within the HTML itself. This is OK for really small images, but for normal sized images, this can lead to a long delay in rendering the page as the entry has to be taken out of the database, sent to you - including the images - then your browser renders it. But your browser can't render it until it's all been fetched. Modern internet makes that much faster than historical times we all grew up in, but it's still a perceptible delay.
So, almost every site uses a piece of HTML code called an Image (img) tag. This is what's embedded in the HTML page, and is tiny by comparison. The database stores this tag as part of the overall entry and the tag tells your browser to 'insert an image here'. It also tells the browser where to find the image on the internet. What this means is that the text of the page is rendered very quickly because it's small. Once the browser has the text rendered it goes back to the internet to grab the images. They then come in at their own sweet pace - but you don't really notice that because now the page is loaded and you've started reading.
That and storing images in a database is just horrible. Blegh.
Anyway, the TL;DR of that is that I have to make some significant changes to the editor code - but I am making good progress and hope to have something up soon.
I'll then get working on people being able to request notification when a diary the want to follow is updated.
Let me know if anyone has anything else they need looking at!