Expanding Lexicons and Hardening AT Explore

Last week I didn’t get a chance to sit down and write an update. I’ll try to cover everything I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks. I’ve got the chance today because, well, an AWS outage will give you a little extra time.

Leaflet Lexicon Expansion

I’ve been working on expanding support for custom Lexicons on AT Explore. Adding support for the remaining Lexicons for Leaflet seemed like a good place to start. To support everything, I just needed to add Subscriptions, Publications, and Comments. I built support for those over the course of the last couple of weeks.

On Friday, I launched support for Publications and Subscriptions. I’ll launch support for comments this week.

Keeping on Leaflet, I also added support for additional iframe elements. I noticed while testing posts in my index that some embeds loaded with a warning saying they weren’t supported. I added support for a handful like Spotify, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Apple Podcasts. I also added some tracking in Sentry to make it easier to identify where I need to expand support for more embeds.

The goal is to continue expanding support for more Lexicons. I’ve talked about this several times, and there are a few I already have on my radar. I’ve realized there are still some core AT Proto Lexicons I don’t yet support. Last week, I worked on adding support for Lexicon schemas.

This makes it much easier to view and read these schemas. I think there are a few other low-hanging fruit that I could add support for fairly quickly. I also have a handful of custom Lexicons I want to add.

Stability

Over the last several weeks, I’ve seen an increase in traffic to AT Explore (yay!), but I’ve also noticed in Sentry that too many sessions were experiencing errors. I spent some time focusing on improving those experiences and hardening the app a bit more. Hopefully, things are much better for anyone who ran into issues before.

Resiliency is a huge focus of mine. I’ve had the “beta” badge on the application since launch in December, and I’d like to remove that soon once I feel like the application is more stable. I feel like I’m getting close to that point.

Indexing and an API

Something that isn’t user-facing, but that I’ve been digging into more is increasing the amount of data I have indexed. It’s been pretty minimal so far and mostly just supports the verification feature. I’ve started focusing on expanding this so I can start doing things like displaying a conversation in the comments on a Leaflet post.

I’ve started expanding the amount of data I’m indexing, but backfilling is still something I need to figure out. I asked about this on Bluesky last week and got some ideas.

I’ve added some more internal endpoints that I’ve started experimenting with for the indexed data. That got me thinking about the possibility of opening up a public API (if people are interested). I’ve been cleaning up the endpoints and documentation I have partly for my own sanity, but also with an eye toward possibly opening the APIs.

This Week

Things kicked off great this week with an AWS outage. It didn’t impact me too much, but there were a few blips here and there. AT Explore stayed online and didn’t experience any issues.

This week, I plan to launch Leaflet comments support as well as Lexicon schema support. I’ve been tinkering with an MCP for AT Explore that I’ll probably mess with a bit more this week — I’ll share more about that soon if people are interested. There are also a few smaller improvements to user pages coming.

I’ll be working a bit more on smaller enhancements and adding support for more Lexicons.