ThoughtStreams Changelog

We've improved the social sharing previews of streams and cards on Facebook, Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

We've changed repost slightly to publish the thought on repost. It was cumbersome (and confusing) to have to explicitly publish after reposting and there just wasn't really any justification for supporting a repost that wasn't immediately published.

Note that if the stream you are reposting to is unpublished, the new thought will continue to not be visible to others.

Notifications

We've now built the foundation of a notification system. As with activities, it's initially limited to likes and favorites but we'll be adding more notification types soon, all individually configurable.

We'll also soon support email notifications, but for now notifications are onsite.

We've changed the right nav bar, adding a bell icon to indicate whether there are notifications. You'll notice we've also changed the Settings and Log out links to be icons too.

When you have notifications, the bell will turn red and you can click it to see the notifications. You can also clear notifications form here.

Note that if you are a member of a team, the notifications dropdown spans both the public site and teams.

Each notification type can be toggled under Notifications on the Settings page.

Activity Stream

We've replaced the per-user Firehose with a new tab called Activity which interleaves content written by that user with activities done by that user and done to their content.

At the moment, the activity types are limited to likes and favorites but we'll be expanding to include other actions shortly.

Viewing what from a particular user has been liked or favorited

There are now two new tabs on a user's page.

Favorited streams shows those streams by that user that have been favorited by others.

Liked thoughts shows those thoughts by that user that have been liked by others.

We've launched three new features today that:

• better show what from a particular user has been liked or favorited
• provide a stream of activities done by a user and done to their content
• lay the foundation for a notification system (starting with on-site notification of new likes and favorites)

Small improvement to unread counts: counts now only include content created since you signed up.

We've tweaked the key bindings.

Firstly, we've changed the "Publish card currently being created" binding to ctrl + enter rather than the old shift + enter. The previous binding was causing accidental publishing of cards for some people when starting a new paragraph.

Secondly, we've fixed a problem where the regular binding for copy (ctrl-C or cmd-C) wasn't working.

To make it (much) easier to see what content is new on ThoughtStreams, we now show unread counts.

If you have any unread cards, the chevron in the top left will turn red. If you click on the chevron to expand the team switcher, you can see the unread counts for the public site and each team you are part of:

From there you can also Mark All Read.

On the latest updated page, each stream is annotated with an unread count:

And if you click through to that stream, the start of the new cards is clearly indicated:

This feature is somewhat experimental and still doesn't indicate new general thoughts. But let us know what you think!

We've extended our keyboard bindings to allow you to do more without leaving the keyboard.

• ? This help dialog
• c Compose a new Thought in current stream
• g Compose a new General Thought
• j or ← View previous card in stream
• k or → View next card in stream
• p View card details in presentation mode
• s Go to stream detail from card detail
• shift + enter Publish card currently being created
• alt + enter Save card in draft status that is currently being created.
• esc Close an open modal

We've now made it much easier to explore the content of a particular user by providing per-user tabs for:

• Updated Streams
• New Streams
• General Thoughts
• Firehose (the default)

Just click on a username to get the new tabbed view of that user's content.

ThoughtStreams now supports rendering mathematics using MathJax.

You can use TeX/LaTeX mathematics syntax, surrounded by \(...\) for inline math and either $$...$$ or \[...\] for display math.

ThoughtStreams now supports embedding gists from GitHub.

Just paste the URL of your gist and ThoughtStreams will expand it. We support multiple file gists and all the different content types that gists support.

If you just want the naked link to appear rather than the expanded gist, mark up the URL in <...> (as with any oembed content that would otherwise be embedded).

We've now added a bookmarklet to post links to your general thoughts.

Go to Your Thoughts and on the left-hand side there's a bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmark bar.

Then from any site, you can click on the bookmarklet and you'll be taken to Your Thoughts with the URL you were at pre-populating the text area.

ThoughtStreams now supports embedding content from other sites just by pasting in a URL.

For example, paste in a YouTube URL and the video will be embedded in your card; paste the URL of a tweet and the tweet will be embedded in your card.

Many different services are supported, including YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr, and tens of others.

Note that we only embed based on naked URLs. If you markup the URL with Markdown's <URL> or [text](URL) it will just link and not embed the content.

Also, we have not applied this change retroactively, so if you want to take advantage of it on existing cards, just edit and save them.

Search now returns Cards as well as People and Streams in its results. This includes cards in General Thoughts.

It's clear that the majority of users, rather than using Markdown's <...> syntax, expect naked URLs to be turned in to links.

We now support this in our rendering of cards.

ThoughtStreams now supports authentication via Twitter.

New users can sign up with Twitter. Existing users can go to Settings > Connections to connect up their Twitter account.

After this, you can log in with Twitter and not need a ThoughtStreams-specific password.

Note that the Twitter connection is read-only and ThoughtStreams will not tweet on your behalf.

Editing a card no longer counts as an update to the stream it's in so will not cause the stream to appear on the latest Updated Streams.

Fixed a bug where a user's last posted included reposts of their cards by others.

Back in May we said:

To prevent double submissions, we now disable the Save as Draft and Publish buttons during posting.

This was not actually working as advertised. After noticing a few recent double posts from people, we now think we've nailed the problem.

You can feel free to delete one of the duplicate posts if you've experienced this problem prior to the latest fix.

Make child of another stream now makes use of the same, in-line stream selector UI (with auto-complete) that was introduced for re-posting back in April.

We've made a lot of improvements around team management (for ThoughtStreams for Teams) including adding role management, the ability to remove people from a team, invite revocation and resending of invites.

As part of our work towards ThoughtStreams for Teams, the public ThoughtStreams site is now free for unlimited streams!

ThoughtStreams is celebrating its second anniversary since launch and we have some exciting news for the future of the site.

ThoughtStreams is already great for capturing your thoughts and ideas, and sharing them with the world.

But what if you want to share thoughts, ideas, experiments and observations just with your team?

We're in the process of rolling out ThoughtStreams for Teams: all the features of the public ThoughtStreams, scoped and private to your team.

If you'd like to participate in the private beta, or just find out when we launch team support, visit https://thoughtstreams.io/teams-beta/.

ThoughtStreams now supports gravatars. You can still upload a new avatar to the site but, by default, a gravatar will be used if available for your email address.

An avatar uploaded to the site will always be used over the gravatar so if you already had an avatar, nothing will have changed.

Favorites

As well as liking cards, you can now also favorite people and streams.

This is done by clicking the star on a stream or profile page.

But whereas likes are a lightweight way of acknowledging what someone has written, favoriting an entire stream or a person has an additional effect.

Now on the main page that shows the latest updated streams, new streams, general thoughts and the fire hose, you can now choose to filter just by favorites.

When filtering by favorites, you'll only see content from streams you've favorited and from people you've favorited.

Likes

We've added the ability to like cards. Just hover over a card and click the heart to let the author know you like what they said.

If a card already has likes, they will be visible without hover.

To improve the experience for readers, we now scale all uploaded images to a maximum of 640×640 on the server (rather than just in the browser).

Note that we still keep the full-resolution image. This scaling is just to improve load times when viewing images on cards.

By popular demand, ThoughtStreams now has a favicon.

It started as a question: what if I want to present a stream as a series of slides, one for each card? Introducing...

Presentation Mode

Firstly, when you're on a card detail page (just click the timestamp on the lower right of any card) the earlier / later links now navigate to the earlier / later card.

Secondly, we've introduced keyboard support: left-arrow and right-arrow navigate between the cards in a stream. up-arrow will take you back to the overall stream.

Thirdly, you can toggle between the normal card detail display and a distraction free larger display for presentations with the p key.

We have more planned for presentation mode and a lot more planned for keyboard support, so stay tuned!

The changelog is now under the docs user rather than jtauber. All old links should redirect.

We've made a number of fixes to the display of reposts and especially reposts of reposts (where the original author of the card and the owner of the stream reposted from were previously mixed up).

It's now possible to edit, unpublish, and delete your cards right from a combined stream.

We've redesigned the look of streams that interleave multiple authors. This includes combined streams as well as the firehose and general thoughts tabs on the latest page.

Previously cards on these streams looked very different from what they did elsewhere because of the avatar and the use of the blue bar to indicate source (conflated with reposting).

Now cards have a consistent look.

With the new look, the stream title, author and avatar are now shown alongside the card.

If multiple cards in a row come from the same stream, we don't repeat the information.

On Safari (including iOS) the stream title, author and avatar are sticky so will follow as you scroll. This will work on other browsers as they roll out support for position: sticky.

When you repost to a stream, the Updated Streams tab on the latest page more clearly indicates that it was a repost.

This particularly helps with reposting someone else's content where the authorship was not previously clear glancing at the updated stream.

There's now a new tab New Streams on the latest page which shows streams in the (reverse) order they were created.

We've renamed the Latest Streams tab to Updated Streams to reduce confusion. The tab has always shown the most recently updated streams, not the most recently created streams and this name change (we hope) makes that fact clearer.

The firehose now includes general thoughts.

We've now added endless pagination to the latest page. Each of the Latest Streams, General Thoughts and Firehose tabs will now incrementally load older information as you scroll down.

We will likely roll it out to other streams as the amount of content increases (we still load the entire stream at once outside of the latest page).

To prevent double submissions, we now disable the Save as Draft and Publish buttons during posting.

The buttons also now start off disabled until you start typing content.

We've re-done media uploading and management.

Paid users have always been able to upload images to include on their cards but we've improved how this looks and works.

• you can now upload and use media on your general stream
• you can delete images not in use and can see which cards are using which images (just click on used by X cards)
• the list of media is more neatly presented and is in a collapsible panel
• you can drag your images directly on to the text area and the markdown will be inserted on drop (this works for editing existing cards as well as new cards)

A field for Twitter username has been added to profiles. Just go to Settings > Profile to add yours.

If you have a Twitter username set, then when your streams or cards are tweeted, the tweet will include an @-mention of your Twitter username.

You can now add thoughts directly from a combined stream.

Previously, if you were looking at a combined stream and wanted to add your own thoughts, you'd have to navigate to your own stream to add the thought or, if your stream didn't exist, go create it then add your thought.

Now you can add a thought right from the combined stream. If you don't have a matching stream, one will be created for you automatically.

On our new latest streams / latest general thoughts / firehose page, your tab selection is now maintained across browser refreshes (which also means you can bookmark a particular tab selection).

ThoughtStreams now has a completely new UI for reposting.

Reposting is a great way to take a thought from elsewhere (maybe another stream of yours or a stream from someone else) and either put it in one of your existing streams or use it to kick off some new stream.

When you hover over a card, the controls appear at the bottom and the left-most control is repost:

Previously, when you clicked on this, it took you to a different page where you could select from a list of all your streams or type in the name of a new stream.

We've now combined this into one text input that expands right under the card you're wanting to repost:

You can just start typing and select either an existing stream or create a new stream with the title you've typed:

You'll then be redirected, as before, to the destination stream. Note that reposted cards are initially unpublished so, to make them visible to others, you'll still need to publish them.

We have a nice new homepage (when unauthenticated, as authenticated users will now be taken straight to the "latest streams" page).

The nav bar colour has been updated to match it.

We've added a new page where you can see at a glance the latest streams, latest general thoughts, combined streams, newest users and even a firehose of all the latest thoughts.

If you're logged in, you can get to it by clicking on the ThoughtStreams logo in the top-left. If you're not logged in, there's a link on the home page.

This new page replaces the latest streams on the home page but includes more streams and other information.

We hope this will keep you better up-to-date with what's happening on ThoughtStreams and help you find more great content.

Individual cards now have their own page.

Whereas previously you could only refer to a specific card with a fragment identifier (which would highlight the card in the context of the entire stream), you can now also link directly to a card shown in isolation.

One benefit of this new feature is it makes sharing individual thoughts on Twitter, Facebook, etc work a little better.

We also have some new features in the works that will rely on cards having their own page.

The fragment identifiers will still work and updates on the home page still link to cards in this way to give you the context.

But now, if you hover over a card and click on the date-time at the bottom right, it will take you to the page just for that card.

Simple stats (thought counts and last update) are now also included on stream detail pages (including combined streams).

User pages now have some simple stats around stream and card counts and when the last (public) post by the user was.

If you look at someone else's page, you'll see something like

whereas on your own page, you'll see something like

It's now easier to delete streams (not that we want you to!)

Previously you could only delete streams from the stream list and, even then, only if they were unpublished first. Now you can delete streams that are published and can do so right from the stream page itself.

Deletion will still prompt you before going ahead, though. There's no undo if you confirm.

Both ascending and descending sorting are now available on streams.

Stream authors can set the default on a per-stream basis. See "Default the stream to sort in ascending/descending order." on the panel on the left of the stream's page.

Readers can toggle between sort direction of any (named) stream with the arrows at the top of each stream.

Full Text Search is now available from every page. Stream content as well as user info is indexed.

We've tweaked the post-Markdown sanitization a little to allow for <hr>, <sup> and <sub>. This seems to allow footnotes in Markdown to work but note they are still problematic because each card is treated as a separate Markdown document so the same IDs are reused between cards in the same stream.

With the incorporation of the general stream into the user page, we've completely redesigned the display of streams from a grid to a list on the right-hand side. This redesign has also been carried over to child streams on a stream page.

General Streams

We've replaced the Inbox with a general, un-named stream that lives on your user page (which used to just show Your Streams). This "general stream" is like your Inbox with the big difference that you can publish cards in it.

We noticed a lot of people were having to create a named stream just for this (with names like "Random Thoughts"). Now you don't have to. If you have such a stream and you'd like the cards moved over to your general stream, just email thoughtstreams@eldarion.com and we can move them over for you.

You can read more about some of the motivation and details of the general stream feature in the General Stream stream.

Markdown documentation has been added and linked from "Markdown supported" under the add card and edit card text areas.

Clicking on an updated stream on the home page now takes you directly to the latest card.

As part of a huge clean up of the site's CSS, ThoughtStreams has an updated, flatter look.

Media upload now shows a progress bar so you can tell if your drag-and-drop was successful and the upload is in progress.

Combined streams are now available in Markdown and as an Atom feed.

You can also now create your own individual stream of the same name from someone else's stream by clicking on Create your own stream... on the left sidebar.

You can now create your own individual stream right from a combined stream (if you don't already have one of the same name).

It's now much easier to navigate from an individual's stream to the combined stream (if one exists). All users participating in a combined stream and now listed in the side bar too.

Combined streams now have a proper title (taken from the streams that kicks it off) and it is possible to repost to a stream of your own from the combined stream.

In addition to the exist per-stream atom feed, there is a now an atom feed for each user which aggregates their streams as well as an overall atom feed which aggregates all streams on the site.

The regular email update now includes a list of new users who have joined the site since the last email update.

You can now export your data as JSON from Export Data under Settings.

As the first step in more collaborative thoughtstreaming, we've added combined streams. The URL /combined/<slug>/ will now show a stream that combines all (published) streams with that slug, regardless of user.

For example: if you want to extend my New TL;DRs post, just create a stream with the same name (or at least the same slug) and it will be included in https://thoughtstreams.io/combined/the-new-tldrs/

This combined stream is currently not actionable (you can't repost from it, etc) but that will come soon as well as a more controlled form of collaborative thoughtstreaming where you'll be able to set up "group" streams.

This is still very much a work in progress but if you add ?style=clean to the end of a stream view you'll see the beginnings of a cleaner styling I'm playing around with for streams (read-only, though).

Fixed bug where Create new stream button was appearing on pages that weren't yours. It didn't do any damage but it shouldn't have been in those places.

We've updated a bunch of dependencies, so let us know if you notice anything strange / broken.

Reposting is no longer restricted to existing streams!

When you repost a card you can now give the name of a new stream to create and repost the card to as an alternative to picking an existing stream.

The Create new stream button is now on the top right of your user page rather than at the bottom of the side bar where it was harder to get to.

We've added experimental support for Twitter cards and the Open Graph protocol so streams that are tweeted or shared on Facebook will present better.

Homepage now displays the eight (rather that four) most recently updated streams.

Markdown formatting and sanitization have been rewritten to allow much better embedding of HTML.

Please let us know if you experience any problems with new or existing cards.

Publish / Unpublish Stream (on stream page) is now a button rather than just a link.

Reposted from/to now links username to user page.

Streams on each user page are now sorted by last update timestamp.

We've added tooltips to all card and stream actions and fixed display issues with long tooltips.

You can now repost other people's cards to your streams!

We plan to refine this further with notifications and opt-out links, but this is a simple but significant change which will hopefully spawn all sorts of possibilities in terms of responding to the thoughts of others.

It is now possible to edit or delete a card in the published state without having to unpublish it first.

Timestamps are now localized based on the timezone you specify under Settings.

We've changed the position of the card controls and made the main content area for cards wider.

We've also made overall tweaks to cards and streams to make the design more consistent between the two.

Email updates now include popular streams (by views in last seven days) both across the site and those specifically authored by you.

We've added profiles that include full name, an avatar, bio, location, website and Gittip username (all optional).

If you include a Gittip username, a Gittip button will appear on your main page.

Thoughtstreams now supports media hosting. On a stream (other than your inbox) you can drag images in then, with a single click, insert the required Markdown to inline the image.

There's now a twitter button on each stream.

An API now exists for posting to your Inbox.

See https://github.com/eldarion/thoughtstreams-api for details.

Now, by default, streams that are children of other streams do not appear at the top-level. You can override this on a per-stream basis by clicking "show at top-level" on the stream's page.

Streams can now be children of other streams.

This enables you to organize related streams.

You can either create a child stream from the parent stream's page (the "Create new child stream" button) or you can put an existing stream under another stream by going to the stream you want to be the child, clicking on "Make child of another stream" and selecting the parent (or creating a new stream to be the parent).

Note that streams can have as many parents as you like.

At some point in the near future, it will be possible to elect, per-stream, whether a stream that has parents is still to be shown at the top-level.

As well as a markdown dump, each stream is available as an atom feed.

You can now create and publish a card with a single click.

When 'Create new stream' is clicked, the browser now scrolls to the form and focuses on the stream title field.

Cards can now be edited while in the unpublished state. If a card is already published, it can be edited by first unpublishing it.

Note: this is intended for minor corrections to formatting, spelling, grammar, etc. The spirit of ThoughtStreams is that if you actually make a mistake or change your mind, you just do a followup card and leave the history intact.

Streams can now be published/unpublished from stream detail page

We've opened up signup and implemented payments and subscription management.

SSL has been added .

Unfortunately, if a card links to a non-https URL (such as the image above), it will cause a mixed content warning.

A card that is a repost now has a link to its originating stream (and card):

It's now possible to repost a card from one of your streams to another. From your Inbox, this is a move; from any other stream, this is a copy.

The metadata shown on a card at the bottom right on hover is now clickable to give a fragment identifier to the card.

The targeted card will be colored differently.

Every stream now has a URL that returns a markdown representation of the entire stream. There's a link on every stream page (or use /{user}/{stream-slug}.md)

Cards and streams now have a completely new visual style for controls:

The homepage now shows the most recently updated streams.

There is now an Inbox, linked from the nav in the top-right, where you can add cards you don't have a stream for yet.

You can now pick any published card to be the lead card for the stream. The contents of the lead card will be shown for that stream on the user's page.

Here's where I'll post updates on what's changed with Thought Streams site.