You Asked, I Coded: A hive.micro Community Update

Hey everyone,

It's been great to see people starting to use hive.micro. Based on some initial feedback and my own to-do list, I've just pushed a significant update that adds two highly-requested features and a few quality-of-life improvements.

Image Uploads via Keychain

One of the most important features for any microblogging platform is the ability to easily share images. I've now integrated an image uploader that uses images.hive.blog as its backend.

When you click the new "Add Image" button, a modal appears allowing you to select a file. To upload, the system uses Hive Keychain to create a signature, providing a secure way to authenticate with the image hosting service. Once uploaded, the Markdown for the image is automatically inserted into your post. I've also added drag-and-drop support directly onto the text area for a faster workflow.

YouTube Link Previews

Bare URLs in a post can be a bit sterile. To make things more engaging, hive.micro will now automatically detect YouTube links and render a clickable preview thumbnail in the feed.

This was a fun feature to implement. On the backend, I wrote a helper that parses URLs to find a valid YouTube video ID from various link formats (e.g., youtube.com, youtu.be, /shorts/, /embed/). If a valid ID is found, the server wraps the link in custom HTML and CSS to create the preview. A small bit of JavaScript then handles the "click-to-play" functionality, replacing the thumbnail with the embedded video player when you click on it. This feature can be enabled or disabled by the instance operator.

Other Small Changes

I've also pushed a few other small but important changes based on community feedback:

• The "New Post" widget now appears at the top of the main feed, so you don't have to navigate to a separate page to share something. (Thanks, @memess !)
• Replies now show a snippet of the post you're replying to, instead of just the generic "in reply to parent." (I think this was a request from everyone.)
• Images posted in the feed will now properly stay within the bounds of the post box. (Thanks, @stresskiller , for breaking it!)

Shoutout to @snook and the rest of the people from #pimp for testing it this morning.

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