The key new feature of this release is a new rich text editor for writing posts on Fans.fm. Prior to this new editor posts were written in a raw textarea component with support for Markdown (if you knew it). Now there is a simple rich editor with support for basics like bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, lists and quotes. What I like is that the content written in the editor pretty much appears how it will once its published as you write it.

The editor is based on QuillJS which is widely used and has broad web browser support. One big reason I chose this editor was the ability for it to cleanly handle pasting in content from other editors which is a hard problem to solve. Now you can copy and paste content from say Google Docs and the formatting that applies (bold, links, etc) should carry over correctly. Specific size or color formatting will now be brought over but that is by design. If you run into issues with the new editor please don't hesitate to email help@fans.fm.

In addition to the editor I spent a lot of time upgrading the underlying framework of Fans.fm which is written in the Stop language and its web runtime. Stop is an open-source language I developed to describe the logic of software systems and the data that moves through them. Think of it as a blueprint for a software system that is not specific to any particular programming language implementation. Anyway, I made some key fundamental upgrades to the Stop language and its runtime to improve Fans.fm's reliability and then wrote a ton of tests to increase the test coverage of the site's implementation. If you'd like to learn more about Stop check out https://www.stop-lang.org.