Our new look

As you will have seen already, we have been making some changes.

We have tried to make every part of the system load faster, be more efficient, and hopefully be easier to use. We’ve made use of the fastest static generators: Hugo and Gatsby. We’ve used one of the top progressive JavaScript frameworks, VueJS. And a new back-end utilising Docker so that we are not tied to a single provider.

You will have already seen the new home page. We have removed the large background image and video. Indeed we have removed every image from it. We have replaced them with SVG files (Scalable Vector Graphics). They are a fraction of the size and so load much faster, but also can scale to any size without losing quality. They are ideal for illustrations of features where actual screenshots aren’t needed. Those have been moved to sub-pages (like this one). As a result the home page is a quarter of the size.

Running an audit using the latest checks, the old site wasn’t great:

The new one is much better. There are still some issues (like using the generic ‘Learn more’ instead of descriptive link text). However it’s a big improvement in performance.

While having a new site is nice, you will be spending more time with our other refreshed components: the new dashboard, and the new API which powers it. There is documentation for our new Video API on our updated developers site.

The new dashboard is built using VueJS: a modern, progressive JavaScript framework. While much of the functionality has been transferred from the old dashboard (as ultimately you are still uploading video files, organising them and managing their metadata), that process has been refined. Being an application means the page does not constantly refresh.

The new dashboard also exposes new features. For example private videos (ones that require authentication to access) can now be accessed using a JSON Web Token (JWT). That opens up a new range of integrations as you are able to create your own JWT to authenticate your viewers. By providing your public key (the public half of a private/public keypair) to us, you can then use your secret private key to digitally sign your own tokens. We’ve written a guide on how to protect your private videos using a JWT however please email us if you have any questions or problems. It’s an advanced feature.

We have yet to migrate all accounts over to use the new dashboard and API. For now please continue to use your existing links. We have kept a link to the old dashboard on our new dashboard’s signin screen. Once all accounts are migrated we will remove that. Where possible we will redirect old links to their new equivalent or to the new sub-domain. For example to the new dashboard, at https://dash.vidbeo.com.

Updated: March 2, 2021