Site search, share improvements, and custom embeds! 🥂

We’ve made a bunch of improvements to Changelog.com since we relaunched last October. Here’s a few of the big ones. We hope you 💚 ’em!

Site Search

You may have noticed there’s a new item in Nav Town 👆.

The ability to search our archive of episodes and posts was on the hit list since day one¹, but it didn’t make the cut for launch.

In fact, other features kept popping up as higher priority than search even after we launched. It wouldn’t be here today if Dennis Reimann hadn’t hopped in and offered to help!² Dennis is a long-time fan (you may know him from his work on the excellent iOctocat) and wanted to pitch in while getting a chance to play with Elixir and Phoenix. He tackled search for us (here’s the PR) and the results are awesome.

Dennis is a multi-talented developer who is available for freelance/contract work. We highly recommend you get in touch with him if you’re in need.

Share Improvements

Another area of the site that didn’t get the TLC it deserved prior to launch was sharing.

We absolutely love it when our listeners help spread the word about our shows, so we wanted to make it a smooth and awesome experience. However, due to time constraints we ended up with a simple Twitter share button to start with. ³

We’ve since revisited sharing and now you get a super cool overlay with all the share options you could ever want (plus Facebook 😜). Here’s what it looks like:

You’re probably looking at the right side of that and thinking, “Embed?” That leads us to our next yuuuge feature…

Custom Embeds

We’re probably the only developer podcast network crazy enough to build a customized, branded, embeddable player widget you can use on your own sites and blogs. That’s exactly why we wanted to do it! 😁

This thing is rad – it has day and night themes, supports oembed and Embedly, and even auto-inserts when you paste a show’s URL in to your Medium posts!💥

The Night theme:

The Day Theme:

Try it yourself and send us a link to your post! We’ll be sure to tweet it around. ✊

More Coming

That’s just a few of the things we’ve been up to. We have a new show in the works, transcripts (!), and a shiny new Changelog Shop all in the pipeline.

Keep up with us and everything going on in open source by subscribing to Changelog Weekly.

Until next time! 💚💚💚

In fact, we've had search in the admin for a long time, but admin UIs require less thought than public UIs, so there you have it.↩
One of the advantages of being open source and built with exciting/new tech is people find reasons to help out. We've enjoyed a boat load of that since we open sourced the site.↩
Are you sensing a theme here? Ship at all costs!↩