Big Search Improvement!
October 3, 2025
at
7:31 PM
Hey everyone. First news post in a while. I've been busy with other stuff in my life, but have still done stuff with Whenplane here and there. But, this new search feature pushed me to make a news post.
Hybrid Search
The WAN Show Search now has a hybrid search feature, which is enabled by default but can be disabled if you want.
Hybrid search combines the classic keyword search with vector embeddings, which allows you to search for (rough) meaning of a query instead of just key words.
This can be super useful if you don't remember the exact words used for something you're searching for, but remember the general gist. As someone with pretty bad memory myself, I know this will be useful for me as I often remember something that was said but can't remember the exact words used.
WAN.show
Recently I was able to get the domain
wan.show. I put some general WAN show info up there, but the main reason I wanted it is to have a list of community projects around the wan show.
I listed Whenplane and WAN Show bingo, but if there are any more I missed, please let me know!
Some other small stuff
Here's some smaller stuff that I've changed in the past while. Mostly small things, but thought i'd mention them.
Topic/timestamp links now actually link to Floatplane when Floatplane timestamps are selected, instead of it just displaying the Floatplane timestamps but still linking to YouTube. Floatplane didn't used to have timestamp links, which is why this wasn't a thing in the first place, but they do now so I added this.
There is now a box on the homepage that shows the current stream title. It only appears if the title is for the closest show, so it won't show the title from last week. It also ignores the "Hello Floatplane!" and "Hello Twitch!" titles.
With this, I also removed the title from the imminent box that pops up when the upload a thumbnail.
Over the past few months, I think I've finally hammered out most of the issues that were causing Whenplane to flicker between online/offline/imminent. There were a few issues causing these, but the big one was that over a year ago I somehow messed up my anti-flicker system so badly that it actually caused more flicker than it did without. Whoops lol.
I think there is still something causing an occasional flicker, but it appears to be pretty rare.
I also found an issue that caused the title and thumbnail to not get sent through the websocket when they changed, which caused them to show up more delayed than they were supposed to. Now, they show up almost immediately after they are first detected (within a second or two).
In late May and early June, I made a bunch of changes that hopefully made things faster. It might not be super noticeable, but most pages (especially the main page) should load faster than before.
That should be most of the notable changes. There was also a bunch of other tiny changes that probably aren't worth mentioning made over the past few months too, but this post would probably be even more long and boring than it already is if I listed them all lol.
As always, please
let me know if you have any issues, feedback, or suggestions for Whenplane.