Redesigning the Project Builder (GET FEATURED!)

Hey everyone,

My extremely competent project manager told me to talk about this 😆, and honestly, he was right to call it out. It's been a busy couple of days getting some much-needed structure, formatting, and safety features merged into HiveTools.

We just wrapped up and merged the latest Pull Request, which brings a major overhaul to the Project Builder page, lists some new pinned scripts, and tweaks the Diesel Pool Swap interface to behave a bit more logically.

Here is the rundown of what went in.

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1. A Sticky Two-Column TOC for the Project Builder

The first major change is to the Project Builder page. The old single-column list of cards worked, but as the index grew, it became a massive wall of text that was hard to navigate.

We did a full template redesign:

• Sticky Sidebar Table of Contents: The page now uses a two-column layout with a responsive, sticky table of contents on the left. It automatically highlights your active section as you scroll.
• New & Reorganized Content: We migrated to the new schema and separated my programming gists into two distinct sections: Learn to Code on Hive (Hive-specific scripts) and Learn to Code (general developer exercises like ciphers and status bar widgets).
• Ecosystem Promotion: We added a dedicated section for the SRBDE SDK stack (hive-nectar, nectarengine, hive-pollen, hive-anther, hive-xylem, hoverfly), featured dedicated developer cards for Vheissu and mahdiyari, and promoted hive-master-skill to a standalone card.

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2. Pinned Gists: Snoop, Powerup, and Savings

As part of the Project Builder audit, I went through my Gists to see what newer tools were missing. I pinned three useful Hive utility scripts that are now featured in the index:

• snoop.py — An internal exchange snooper script to monitor Hive/HBD trades.
• powerup.py — A simple script to automatically power up your liquid HIVE to Hive Power (HP).
• savings.py — Automatically deposits liquid HBD into your Hive savings account using a YAML configuration.

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3. Swap UI: Spot Rates, Fee Details, and URL Syncing

We also took some time to clean up the Mithril Diesel Pool swap page to address a few small logic bugs and state-preservation issues:

• Fee-Free Price Impact: The displayed price impact (slippage) calculation now evaluates slippage against a fee-free baseline. This prevents the standard 0.25% pool fee from artificially inflating the reported price impact number on small trades.
• Spot-Rate Preview: If you select a pair but haven't typed an amount yet, the card now displays a live spot-rate preview (both forward and inverse rates) and pool depth details, rather than showing blank/empty placeholders.
• URL Query-String Sync: Selecting input and output tokens now syncs them to the URL query string (e.g. /swap?input=SWAP.HIVE&output=DEC). If you refresh the page or share the link, your active token pair is preserved.
• Slippage Fallback: Added a safe parser to the slippage input. If the local storage value is corrupted or gets parsed as NaN, it defaults back to 0.5 instead of breaking quote calculations.

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4. Hardening Security: Anti-Bot & Keychain Session Middleware

Behind the scenes, we rolled out two key security upgrades to improve site reliability and protect endpoints:

• WSGI Browser Check Middleware: To filter out dumb scraping bots and automated scripts that hammer the server, we introduced a custom WSGI middleware. If a visitor lacks the cookie, the server automatically serves a theme-aware Bootstrap 5 challenge page. The page sets a short-lived cookie using JavaScript and refreshes the browser. Simple crawlers that don't execute JS are blocked from hitting the site.
• Keychain-Backed Server Sessions: We completely overhauled the site’s authentication. Previously, the site relied on client-supplied headers (X-Hive-Account) which were easily spoofed. We replaced this with a cryptographically verified session-based authentication flow. Now, logging in triggers a challenge-response handshake: the server generates a unique challenge nonce, the user signs it using Hive Keychain (via their Posting key), and the server cryptographically validates the signature against the Hive blockchain before initializing a secure, temporary Flask session. Not that there is anything there they could do without keychain anyway, but I like security.

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Also, my highly competent project manager made it a point to say: "make sure to include a call to action to suggest new open-source links and profiles."

So here is the pitch: the Project Builder is meant to be a living community resource. If you have built open-source Hive SDKs, handy gists, utility scripts, or want your developer profile featured, don’t hold back. Make a comment, suggest a link, or send over your details so we can get your work highlighted.

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It feels good to get these updates pushed. As always, thank you to everyone in the community for the suggestions and feedback!

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM

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