Dear Sanctuary owners, Dear Forum users,we had seem some awesome new things for Biblepay in the last days, like the upcoming Biblepay Mobile Wallet, which looks fantastic. It is great to know that Biblepay is still so powerful and alive. My own work is a little bit smaller this time, and not as great as the Mobile Wallet, but I still hope that it is part of the overall movement to make Biblepay great.
Again I choosed to send in a combined proposal, at it seems a lot easier to handle than multiple smaller proposals, I hope this is ok for everybody.
My work this month was focused on fine tuning the projects I started the last month, make them more stable, more useful and fix some small problems. I personally think that is very important to not only start projects, but to maintain them
Biblepay CentralIt makes me really happy to see Biblepay Central used by so many users, as you can often see it in discussions when it is used in links. But nothing is perfect, and there is still a lot todo with Biblepay Central. My work this month related to Biblepay Central was:
1. Improving the Mining How-To
I'm proud of this how to, and how it helps so many newcomers. Most of the time this month I fixed smaller spelling mistakes, updated all the sections to reflect the current situation with biblepay and added more informations for experienced users. I also integrated a lot of fantastic feedback and helpful ideas from other users into the guide. Thanks to all users who submitted text for fixes for the guide.
Plus I improved the FAQ section, to help users solve some basic problems on their own. The new entries are based upon standard problems I saw in the forums.
Indeed, feedback is still very welcome
2. "How to get Biblepay Coins" Section added
The "How to get Biblepay Coins" section was added to help new users start with biblepay mining, as it requires some coins in their wallet. It is a small list of things users can do to start getting coins. Nothing big, but I hope it leads them in the right direction.
3. Mobile view improved
Last, still very important: I improved the mobile view of Biblepay Central by ensuring that every element of the page is responsive, even all of the tables. I used a nice trick to transform the tables into lists that works great on mobile devices.
In addition, I reworked some Graphics and Charts to fix the mobile screens, and fixed some css and html errors.
Ubuntu PackagesA lot of feedback I get suggests that the Ubuntu packages are used by many users right now. This is good, as this is reasons why they exists. But while they work good, not always was I fast enough in creating new packages when important changes happen. The reason is that I create the packages manually, as I want to ensure that everything is fine.
To solve this problem, I made some changes, but they took surprisingly much time, as launchpad is often a little bit... unstable.
1. Nightly Builds service
Yes, you read right, Biblepay now has a Ubuntu Packages Nightly Build PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~biblepay/+archive/ubuntu/nightlyA new server of mine (as it contains the secret gpg keys, it can't be one of the existing servers for security reasons) is looking for new commits on the github repository of biblepay and creates a new package every hour if something had been changed.
2. Created a Biblepay Team on Launchpad
The current Biblepay Ubuntu PPA contains my own username, but it is now so widely used, that it seems better to rename it. To do that, I started a Biblepay-Team on Launchpad, so other users could be invited, too.
The Team has the same configuration, so we still have packages for ARM (2x), i386 and x64 available.
For the next month, I will maintain both PPAs (my own and the team), When I'm sure that the team PPA works well, I will anounce the end of life for my own PPA later.
3. The PPA is now self-containing
Before this change, users needed to add the biblepay AND the bitcoin PPA. But now, the biblepay PPA contains everything a user needs, including the barkley libdb packages. It took some time to make this work, as Launchpad won't compile the packages, but now it seems to be as stable as the bitcoin PPA for these packages.
It looked weird that we needed the Bitcoin PPA, I think it looks much more profesional without it.
4. Preparing for Bionic (Ubuntu 18.04)
End of this month, Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic will be released. I started to support it, but Launchpad fails at compiling packages for it right now, so we need to wait some time until packages will be available. Not all dependencies seems to be ok right now. It took some hours to understand this problem...
5. Updated the Wiki
Indeed, I updated the official Biblepay Wiki to reflect the changes above. I also removed the "Unofficial" from the PPA, as I hope that I proved my trustworthiness, so that the PPA now looks more inviting for users.
HostingFor the first time, I want to ask for support in the hosting costs. In didn't want to do this, but the number of servers is growing, and a little bit of support would be fantastic. This does NOT include the servers for Purepool.
Servers:
1. Biblepay-Central
2. Biblepay-Central Explorer
3. Nightly-Build Server
Including Domains, Backups and Hosting, this makes 250 EUR for 12 month.
PurepoolIndeed, as last month, these changes are not part of the proposal, but I want to list them for your information.
1. Checking the validity of the CPID
With the great help of Rob (he added a very important new output/check to the biblepay client), the pool can now check if the CPID is valid, and if the solutions submitted helps finding blocks. Makes the pool even more fair.
CalculationCalculation in EURO:
1 BBP: EUR 0,0027 (coinmarketcap)
Per Hour: 40/h
Time Log:Biblepay-Central: 10h
Ubuntu Packages: 12h
Budget: IT
Requested budged for this proposal: 418'518 BBP (22h @ 40 + 250eur)
