Hello to all of you,
Today I'll like to share my latest developments on Inkito, the Hive interface for series. I worked on the alpha version over the summer but it is far from over. So I'm back at it.
As I mentioned last week, I'm working hard on optimizing the home page load time and adding more series from the Hive community.
Before sharing my latest endeavors let me explain how the system currently works.
When a user posts content, Inkito creates a unique id composed of the username and series title. This id is set as a tags to identify and order the series.
That allowed me to design a system solely relying on Hive and no additional database. A true decentralized option.
So what is the problem...
Well on the home page I only need to load cover information (one image, title, author, last payout). But with the current system I need to dig through all the series posts to find the first one which contains the data. This is not the most efficient and results in an asynchronous cover load.
See covers loading one by one.
The system became even slower as I began adding content with no inkito tags. This time I had to go through all content of a user (yes, even unrelated blogs) to find posts with a title matching the series title. All this to return the cover.
This none sense had to stop! So I created a database just for the cover information.
See content loading all at once, in less than a second. OMG
I added the series permlinks in the database as well. I do go through every post at least once anyway and this will improve the reader loading time. By keeping the original logic, the permlink and last payout information is updated automatically if any new episode come out.
I know it strays away from a Hive autonomous platform but it was needed to scale the website.
So for now, I have a simple whitelist of content that I'll be updating with as much series as I can. It's basically hard coded series that would trigger the auto update script.
This is a temporary system to include Hive content and get momentum going. Eventually it would make more sense if creators were posting directly through Inkito.
Anyway, for the time being, please share your suggestions for comics or novels you'd like to see on Inkito! I'll try my best to add as many as I can. I even think a series of article you would like organized could fit the platform! If you are a creator please drop me a line, it'll be my pleasure to add your content. Otherwise posting through Inkito would be the best way to join in.
So, this new structure is not yet in production as still need to clean up the code and adapt the front end to this new database system.
I'll share more about it after the weekend.
I might have gone a little too technical here. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
See you on the other side,
Jrej