SteemPlus 2.13: A big refractor to boost performance
This new release doesn't add any new feature to your Steem experience.
Do not be disappointed though! We have kept a crazy developing pace for a few months, and with 28 different features to this day, SteemPlus has become quite a big extension. Recently, we have noticed that these many features were starting to have an impact on the performance and that it would make Steemit sluggish or even freeze at some points.
We cannot prefer quantity over quality, and hence decided to allocate some time to make a huge refractor in order to resolve those issues and clean the code.
Read on to see some of the things we did in more details. You can also find the list of features and installation procedures at the end of this post.
SteemPlus code changes
We've refractored every single js file in SteemPlus to apply the following changes:
Every feature is now bound to start only for certain urls. For this, we used regular expressions (regex) and checked if those regex were matched by the current url on Steemit (or Busy when applicable). Some features (such as the Steem Sincerity plugin) need to be loaded on many different pages so it took us a while to test every case.
Once this regex is matched, we need to find (using
jquery) the element of Steemit or Busy that we want to modify. Since the speed at which the page loads depends on the user's Internet speed, we had to loop the function checking for these elements. However, in certain cases, Steemit can fail to load the elements and algorithm would keep looping forever. Not good! We've added a maximum number of retries to make sure it doesn't happen!
Applying these two changes to all the 30 javascript files was time-consuming but worth it: no more evidence of sluggishness caused by the extension could be found on our end.
We were let with a last problem: the interface seemed to periodically freeze and it was caused by an old piece of code that we had poorly coded a while ago. The calls for the Bittrex API to get the STEEM and SBD prices were originally done once when the page was loading. We made blocking calls to this API ( stops everything until the results arrived) by mistake and didn't realize it at that time since the function was called once only. We recently updated this function to run every minute, hence causing these freezes. We changed it to an asynchronous call to this API and couldn't reproduce this problem ever since.
We hope you will appreciate these performance upgrades on your extension and will stay tuned for the next things we ve got coming for you ;)
Coming soon
- User statistics
- Some Android stuff, we ll come to it ;)
Repository, Pull requests and Commits
- Repository : SteemPlus
- Main Pull Request : SteemPlus 2.13
Wanna contribute?
Join us on Discord
List of features
The complete list of feature and their description can be found in the documentation.
Available on Steemit and Busy
- Voting slider for minnows (you do not need to vote at 100% anymore!)
- True value of your account on your wallet (calculated with current SBD and STEEM market prices)
- Delegation button in your wallet (with list of delegatees and undelegate button)
- One click switch between Steemit , Busy, Utopian and Steemd
Available on Steemit (and mspsteem)
- Feed+ : Filter your feed by tags, resteems (hide, show, blacklist, whitelist), reputation and sort it by upvotes/date/payout
- STEEM/USD and SBD/USD values in the user dropdown
- Option to add beneficiaries to your post (you can say that 10% of your post payout will go to one of your friends for example) - 5% fee goes to SteemPlus if you use this feature.
- Cool badges on user profiles show their rank: Plankton, Minnow, Dolphin, Orca and Whales
- Direct transfer to users
- Favorites
- Steem Sincerity
- All Steemit More Info features
- Steemit Board Awards
- Witness information
- Enhanced wallet
- Rewards Information
Installation procedures
You can download and install SteemPlus directly from the Chrome Store if you are using Chrome (follow this link ).
For installation procedures on Opera and Firefox, please check our documentation.
Big shoutout to @jerrybanfield and his budgets project that allow us the speed up the development of SteemPlus!
@stoodkev and @cedricguillas for @steem-plus
loving this, this will make ride more smooth on steemit , smt is going to blow up the market
I know right :)I mean sure you can upvote this comment too if it helps
i love using #steem-plus addons on my browser.
It make me easier to observe my activity and others.
Waiting for the android version.
Glad you like it! The Android version will take time but it s part of our plans! =)
It will be worth waiting for of this is anything to go by .....but please..quickly lol ;-)
Great work folks. I really appreciate the many useful features you have packed into SteemPlus! Thank you!!!! 100% upvote for you!
Thank you @terrybrock! Would you consider voting me as a witness to support the project?
Yes, tell me more. I don't know you.
Hi! Besides being the creator of SteemPlus, I have worked on several Steem related projects such as Utopian-1UP, a hivelike curation project for Utopian; I contributed to the first iterations of Utopian bot; developped AgX project for aggroed and will soon be helping to develop new tools for the Minnow Support Project.
I pledged to spend my time developing the tools that the community needs, not the one that would bring me easy money such as bid bots.
Finally, in terms of hardware, I have a 128 GB RAM server that is way more than enough for running a witness.
You can contact me on Discord or Steem.chat if you have any question
wouldn't you be more transparent if you noted that use of the beneficiary feature also sends 5% to you rather than people needing to find the github for that detail? or discovering it in their payout when you show up as a beneficiary
btw, least you misunderstand, the steemplus extension is aweseome and I don't begrudge the 5%, it just shouldn't arrive as a surprise when using the feature.
You re right, I ll add it in the post. I just didnt want to copy the whole documentation in here, but this point makes sense.
This is great. Day by day improve. Keep it up @steem-plus
I had been noticing the sluggishness and freezing, so this sounds like a most welcome update.
Thank you for all your continued work on this.
Will it update automatically, or do I need to do any sort of manual update process?
This post has been just added as new item to timeline of SteemPlus on Steem Projects.
If you want to be notified about new updates from this project, register on Steem Projects and add SteemPlus to your favorite projects.
Please tell me this is all true?
I have to try steem-plus then. I can't wait to see my voting power before casting votes. It has been quite a burden to me here on steemit.
Loving Steem Plus! ^_^ Extra's are great!
Me parece buena la aplicación plus, creo que vienen mejores cosas