Fider
Saturday, March 16, 2019

Fider 0.18 has been released with attachments and better SEO

#1: Image Attachments

This is the third version in a row that we have delivered our most wanted feature, which in this version was Image Attachments on Posts and Comments 🎉

This new feature that allows users to upload up to 3 images when submitting a new post or comment.

Staff members still have full control over the post/comment and can delete or replace any uploaded image.

#2: Better SEO (experimental)

For those who are new to Fider, it's important to know that Fider is a client-side rendered application built with React. When a Search Engine like Google or Bing fetches a page served by Fider, they get minimal HTML content, some JSON metadata and some JavaScript files that render the page based on the metadata.

Some engines have a lower priority when indexing pages that are client-side rendered, which can affect the SEO ranking.

Dynamic rendering is a process of serving different contents based on request. The idea is that a SEO crawler would get receive a server-side rendered result because that's what they prefer, while an end user browser would still perform the rendering client-side. For more details on Dynamic rendering, visit https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering

Because SEO is an important aspect for Fider, we've decided to improve this area by creating an open source prerender service called Rendergun. This new release of Fider has a native integration with Rendergun, but is not yet documented. We'll update our documtation page once this has been tested and is stable enough.

If you're self-hosting a Fider instance and would like to experiment this as well, please get in touch with us contact@fider.io.

Other Changes on Fider 0.18

  • feature: prerender crawler requests if rendergun is configured (#724)
  • feature: add attachments to comments (#734)
  • feature: image attachments on Posts (#719)
  • feature: upload custom avatar (#699)
  • feature: user can choose between Letter and Gravatar (#697)
  • feature: S3, SQL and File System as blob storage (#681)
  • feature: option to set site under maintenance (#679)
  • enhancement: make show more a link (SEO) (#667)
  • enhancement: set canonical link on HTML (#675)
  • enhancement: improve Post query performance (#686)
  • enhancement: configurable max/idle database connections (#676)
  • enhancement: implement touch icons (#677)
  • enhancement: health check should ping database (#680)
  • enhancement: cache gravatar response (#564)
  • enhancement: replace googleplus (deprecated) with google api (#693)
  • design: minor UI fixes (#682)
  • tooling: update all NPM packages (#729)
  • fix: use rendergun on React pages only and block ads (#728)
  • fix: write logs on a separate goroutine (#725)
  • fix: sanitize input before parsing markdown (#727)
  • fix: allow duplicate ID when post is deleted (#715)
  • fix: use double quotes (#712)
  • fix: increase custom CSS priority (#706)
  • fix: force min/max size values (#698)
  • fix: handle invalid ServerNames during SSL handshake (#689)
  • fix: don't set cookies on cached content (#674)
  • fix: don't cache the assets base url (#669)
  • fix: incorrect order of parameters (#668)
  • docs: windows dev environment common issues (#605)

What's next?

Help us shape the future of Fider. Visit our feedback forum and raise your voice. Tell us what to do next.