Update 0.28.4: Optimisation-Focused

The last production release of this project was 0.27.0, which was a year and a half ago.

Throughout this time period, despite grave challenges in the maintainer's personal circumstances, they released 0.27.1 (Pre-release), 0.28.0-beta, 0.28.0-rc, 0.28.1-beta and 0.28.2-beta, all gradually improving the experience over this project bits by bits.

Today, we are proud to bring you the next major version, 0.28.4. Here's what's changed:

News

🎉 merger now on cdnjs (and its mirrors!)

• This project used to rely on jsDelivr on loading static assets. After jsDelivr lost its ICP license and was momentarily censored in China, we deem it unviable to act as our js cdn.
• The obvious solution would be reverting to load assets from local
  However, thanks to the community's support and approval to this project in the past years, as of 0.28.0-rc (#35), merger is now on cdnjs as a library: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/merger.
• Which means loading assets from China-optimised CDNs is now back as a practicality:
  • Recommanded: https://cdn.staticfile.org/merger/
  • https://lib.baomitu.com/merger/
  • https://cdnjs.loli.net/ajax/libs/merger/
  • https://cdn.bootcdn.net/ajax/libs/merger/

🥤 Gulp Support Enables Custom-Built Assets and Minification

• As a part of 0.28.0-rc (#35), we have added gulp support to the project. Previously, merger was nothing more than a single-page HTML application, with minification of html and other asset files done via external integrations.
  • The addition of gulp enables a one-stop shop for html/css/js minification & bundling. In addition, via the npm run build command, a compressed merger site will be exported to the /build directory, preserving all of your customisations made to the code.

🚫 Tenpay (QQ Wallet) Support has been Dropped

• Due to limitations placed on the QQ Mobile app making scanning QR Code to open merger extremely difficult, while the QQ Wallet holds very little market share and usage today, we have decided to drop support for Tenpay (QQ Wallet)
  • This means the qrcodeapi variable is no longer necessary, while relevant code enabling QQ Wallet support was wholly removed

Changes

Breaking

• 6f61852 249924a fe296a4 Tenpay (QQ Wallet) support has been dropped due to limitations on QR Code scanning and recognising placed by QQ

Optimisations

• a96fe30 Changed font families under different langauges for better experiences on some devices.
• 1b43f96 The loading of the avatar has been prioritised. This is accommplished by putting the relevant JavaScript code before loading external JavaScripts.
• 9a6d5bf Avatars are now loading avaptively in respect to the device screen size, rounded to the nearest 50px, ranging from 200-500 px.
• 9b797e7 Update DNS Preconnect header for better speed.
• 4f8f0f0 Slightly improved performance achieved by moving the MD5 function around.
• 0f5dfaa After some considerations, the placeholder avatar, considering it's rare practicality, will be loaded remotely on-demand, reversing 088a72c
• 4ec7f71 The gravatar_url has been changed to sdn.geekzu.org due to the official source experiencing connection_reset issue regionally in China
  • gravatar.loli.net is removed due to a bug on its caching behavour, neglecting the ?s=xxx parameter
  • cravatar.cn was considered but appearenly it involves censorship mechanisms, while confidence is lacked from this project in regards to its long-term sustainability and fundamental philosophy
• 249924a The logic in verifying whether profile is link or email has been improved to be nearer a good practice
• d64d207 s1.pstatp.com has been dropped due to its lack of synchronisation; cdn.staticfile.org is now being used, which still offers global CDNs
  • 006d0cc jQuery has been updated to 3.7.0
• d986ce3 a1c7f04 preconnect headers has been correspondingly updated

Developer Experience

• 2ece0f3 Rename/remove minified files; at this stage, minified files will no longer rely on particular Code Editors' feature set to be generated. They are now generatable through gulp compile.
• 472476e, 545b25c, 6a53fa3 and e3fac47 Enable complete gulpjs support
  • npm i
  • npm run compile
  • npm run build - the build will be at /build directory
• 6f61852 The repository url across the project has been changed to https://github.com/qr-merger/merger
• c5332e1 A web-analytics script provided by Microsoft Clarity has been added to allow the project to track its usage; disable it by modifying the tracking variable in Config Section from true to false
• 0f1fc4c Relative paths are used in gulp build to resolve path issues when placed in a sub-directory
• 63b69e2 jQuery has been added as a NPM package for vulnerability tracking

Sponsorship

• 08a1c83 42ed171 This project has been sponsored by CloudFlare, correlating logo and link are placed at the README

What's Changed

• Update 28 Part 1: Functionality Update by @hifocus in #33
• Update 28 Part 2: Dev Features by @hifocus in #35
• Bump gulp-html-minifier-terser from 7.0.0-beta.0 to 7.1.0 by @dependabot in #38

Full Changelog: 0.27.0...0.28.4