Byte Size: Version 2

Welcome to the newest edition of Byte Size! In these regular updates, we provide details of our latest activities to reflect the important behind-the-scenes work that our volunteers are doing. It's not always clear how much effort goes into producing the VH projects you love, so Byte Size exists to show you the round-the-clock activities needed to produce and maintain our projects.

• 5 Minutes 5 Vegans: This web-based tool, which uses Twitter bots to scan and display posts from users interested in adopting veganism, has started being redesigned for a more intuitive user experience and enables toggling between two versions (one for Twitter, one for Reddit). The Reddit bot is currently under development.

• Open Sanctuary: For our sanctuary management tool, we performed user market research. We conducted surveys with about 50 sanctuaries to better understand and get feedback on best practices for managing their animal residents. We have started designing mockups and wireframes.

• Playground: This project will automate and streamline the process of connecting volunteers with opportunities. Application form and submission has been completed by our designers, and we are wrapping up development of the Playground page on the VH website. This required creating a login/email verification flow and corresponding API endpoints to display project requests and an application form for those interested in submitting a project. 

• Vegan Activism Bot: We've set up a dashboard for this Reddit bot that replies with resources such as documentaries, recipes, and communities to join. The dashboard provides a visual for metrics, such as number of clicks for each link, number of times that the bot makes a comment with that link, and countries in which the clicks are originating from. This will be deployed shortly.

• Vegan Bootcamp: We’ve made changes to the community forum, updated courses (fixed broken links and images), fixed some bugs, and redesigned the homepage to give users a comprehensive understanding of the project. We also ensured it is a more mobile-friendly experience for users.

• Vegan Linguists: This project has seen a handful of updates ranging from fixes to browser responsiveness, addition of pagination in its notifications pages, scheduled job for resizing of user photos, and a cookie banner, and changes to make the website faster and more secure.

• WatchDominion.org: This project has also been updated to dynamically fetch and display visitor stats, improve its search engine optimization (SEO), and automatically play the video to increase engagement. There is further support for easy switching between languages. Our team has also created a video player which allows captions that support 30+ languages and user customizations (e.g. theme color, movie poster for display). To use, simply click on the “Embed” button which opens up a dialog with the code snippet.

This list covers in-house projects only, but our team has also put a lot of hard work into projects for external organizations. For more updates, please follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn and read our newsletter. There are plenty more exciting updates to come, so watch this space and thanks for reading!