The Tiki-Toki team are always hard at work behind the scenes improving the software and making things easier for our users. In future, we'll be covering some of that behind-the-scenes work in the blog. Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of two new features: password-protected timelines and lazy image loading!
First off, password-protected timelines: back in the old days, you had only two options for sharing your timelines - make your timeline public or share your login details so viewers could log in as you (which we strongly discourage!). Now there is a middle way so you can share your timeline with only those you want to see it by password-protecting it. As with the public option, you simply email someone the url of the timeline for them to see it. But rather than just being straight-away presented with the timeline, the visitor must firstly enter the password before they are shown the timeline.
To password protect your timeline for sharing, first open your timeline for editing. Once your timeline is open, click on the 'Settings' tab in your Admin Menu, and then click on the 'Advanced Settings' button. A pop-up window will open - scroll until you see the 'Privacy' section which is almost at the bottom. Select 'Password protected' from the drop-down menu, and then enter your chosen password in the field that will appear below the drop-down menu. Click save, and then share away, confident in the knowledge that your timeline can only be accessed if the viewer knows the password.
The second feature launching today is lazy image loading. Now, your reaction to this could range from 'What on earth...?' (which was my reaction when I first heard about it) to 'Oh, that's quite spiffy'. Whatever your reaction, it will reduce load times for timelines - which can only be a good thing. The way it works is that when a timeline is first loaded, only the images that appear on your screen will load. So as you scroll through a timeline, images will load as needed rather than all the images in a timeline loading at once. This makes the whole timeline load significantly faster.
However, if you've only got a few images and you'd really, really like them to load all at once, you can disable lazy loading. Go back into the 'Advanced Settings' menu as described above. Under the 'General options' section at the top of the pop-up, you will find a field for 'Lazy image loading'. You can enable and disable it using the drop-down menu. Be sure to click save before closing the pop-up!
That's everything for the moment. If you have any questions about these features or if there's something you'd like us to cover in the blog in the future, drop us an email at blog@tiki-toki.com.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the new features!