December 2021 update
December was a busy month once again: I focused on the new and upcoming equipment database, on improvements to the IOTD/TP process, and performance.
Read on to learn more about what's new on AstroBin and what's coming up next (and remember: the list doesn't include bug fixes, most infrastructure work, and smaller features 😛).
Since we're on the last day of the year, I wish each and everyone of you a year full of health, prosperity, and love. Happy New Year! ❤️
🏅 Improvements to the IOTD/TP process
The IOTD/TP process is continuously tweaked and improved in order to ensure that the selection of the Image of the Day and Top Picks as is as unbiased and fair as possible.
I'm sure most of you know how it works by now, after having read the IOTD/TP Manifesto. Those who haven't yet, are kindly invited to do so.
The current incarnaton of the process has evolved during 7 years of listening to feedback, ironing out kinks, and making informed decisions on the direction of the IOTD/TP.
In response to recent feedback, a few improvements have been applied to the selection process:
When an image is dismissed by 5 individual team members, that image is removed from the process. This ensures that the six least knowledgeable members of the team cannot do "damage" but selecting a Top Pick that doesn't meet AstroBin's quality standards.
The submission process changed from implicit to explicit. Before this change, all images were entered in the IOTD/TP process automatically upon publication (unless the photographer had opted out in their settings). Now, images need to be submitted explicitly using the Actions menu, within two days of its publication. You are still able to choose to submit all your new images automatically, if you feel confident. 😊
The selection queues where the team members operate have received a few usability and performance improvements.
Together, points 1 and 2 above ensure that the volume of images that the team has to process is more manageable. This leads to the members of the IOTD/TP team spending more time evaluating each image.
🏅 Selection of the 2022 IOTD/TP team
The application and voting process has now completed and we have a team for
2022!
I would like to thank the ~500 people who applied to be part of the process, and the hundreds to voted for the 8 judges.
You have selected the following esteemed colleagues as IOTD Judges for 2022:
The Submitters and Reviewers team is made up by 44 people (22 submitters and 22 reviewers) and their names will be published in January.
📷 Progress on the new equipment database
Work on the new equipment database and module, which is the highlight of 2021, is ongoing, and during December we made a lot of progress again.
These are the highlights:
After completing the toolkit to enable wikipedia-style editing of equipment items, I have been focusing on enabling the initial roll out of the new features: I have implemented the equipment selection in the image upload and editing forms, and I'm in the process of integrating the new database in the technical card of the images, and the search engine. This will allow me to do an initial roll-out and testing phase hopefully by the end of January.
David Stevenson, Matthew MacLean, Gernot Schreider and others have done a lot of work to generate an initial set of consistently named object with the goal of covering the majority of AstroBin users and images. It's important to not start with a blank state and release the tools into the wild, to ensure naming consistency.
When I roll this out, you will be able to migrate your existing gear on AstroBin to the corresponding items in the new equipment database. We are working on doing this automatically for as many items as possible, but given that there are 140,000 items in the current database (due to the duplication and fragmentation issues I've discussed in the past), and many of them are not unambiguously identifiable as a certain product, we will need the help of the large community.
What's the expected timeline for all this?
In January, I hope that I can gradually roll out the tools to enable the community to collaborate on the equipment database and migrate the legacy database.
In February, I hope that I have completed work on the community pages for equipment items and the new search tools and that the new equipment database will be used by everyone.
🛫 Mathieu Guinot's catalogues of AstroBin images
Mathueu Guinot did some very nice work and collected many AstroBin images to publish Messier, Caldwell and Van den Bergh catalogues (with permission by the photographers whose images were used).
You can find them on this page:
guinotmathieu.wixsite.com/astrophotographies/catalogues?lang=en
🛫 Performance improvements
This month I implemented a pretty noticeable performance improvement, and it's a little sneaky 😀 Every time you mouse-hover an AstroBin link for more than 65 milliseconds, that page is prefetched even before you click it. This can lead to page loading speeds improved by over 200 milliseconds (yes, I was also surprised to learn that we are that slow at clicking after we have placed the mouse cursor over the element we want to click!), which in many cases means that a page will load twice as fast.