June 22nd 2021 - Updates and New Features

22/06/2021 02:26:00

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Hey Everybody,

As promised I wanted to keep everybody updated on the latest features / news for UFOSlice.com!

New UFO Channels Added

I have added the following channels to the tracker:

Re-Writing the Code

I have been working mostly on the worker files (the scripts that pull the data across from other platforms into UFO Slice. Even after last weeks update which did see a slight reduction in YouTube API calls, we were still hitting the top end of the charts (image below)

I decided to re-write the whole YouTube integration on the 20th of June, which as you can see has vastly reduced the usage, and will allow me to add more UFO related channels without worrying we would exceed the quota again ?

Twitter Feeds

Part of this weeks development work has gone into working on a pretty cool feature "Twitter Feeds". Every hour UFO Slice will automatically download tweets and store them in an easy to use and read fashion.

The current hashtags being pulled are:

There have been many times where I'd saved a tweet to show friends/family, only for it to be "unavailable", this is no longer a problem.

I do plan to work on this more where you can save tweets to your favourites, but for now - lets see how it all works ?

Disclosure Countdown

Although I feel this is a waste of time, I had fun making a small little countdown timer which is shown in the side bar and counts down until the end of the month - when full UFO Disclosure "should" have happened.

Live Stream / Video Premier Detection

I have re-written the whole code base for checking if a channel has a video premier scheduled, or the user is actually live. This sort of ties in with the YouTube API, but trying a slightly different method which seems to work much better, and is much faster ?

UI Changes

The mobile version of UFO Slice has been worked on a little more to ensure viewing / browsing from mobile and tablets is much more pleasing ?

"Log in" link changed to "Sign in with YouTube". Many users felt like they needed to manually create an account on UFO Slice, however once they realised they could use their existing Google / YouTube account I saw an increase in sign ups - which is awesome!

The sidebar now has the option to scroll (not that cool yet haha), but does allow me to add many more channels to the site without causing any problems.

What's Next?

Now that I am happy with how the Twitter Integration works, I will be taking it step further and showing the selected channels tweets on their channel page. This will hopefully help discovery of the channels through natural SEO.

I will also be changing how the thumbnails are shown on the site to include the following:

Length of Video
Name of the Channel

with so much more...