What's new in Defkey?

Public changelogs for web sites aren't so common, but we'd like to let you know a bit about development side. Every time we update Defkey's code, we'll list changes and fixes here.

Current build: 3.8.0.0

Note: Any new feature or change I mention may not appear in every page immediately because of the caching. It'll appear eventually in a few days, or you can try adding a dummy querystring to the URL (such as ?freshpageplease=true) to get latest page from the server.

Compiled on: 22 January 2024 13:34 UTC (57 days ago)

17.01.2024

  • New feature: The "keyboard visualizer" appears will be converted to an image to appear in Google Images. This automatically generated image can also be shared by you. This image can be seen by clicking "More information" on any game's shortcut list, but should be created first. That will take some days, weeks as it will be slowly done in the background.

11.01.2024

  • New feature: In game shortcuts, there is a now little keyboard shown over the game image. It offers a visual overview for single (hotkeys without a key combination) hotkeys in the game. It doesn't visualize key combinations, so for now will only be seen on game shortcut lists. There is a quite a bit room for improvement, and I'll be focusing on this for the time being.

01.01.2024

  • New feature: A "shortcut card" just for Google Images (won't be seen on the site). The cards includes a few pieces of information from /what-means/ pages such as https://defkey.com/what-means/ctrl-t . These cards will be generated slowly in the background, and will be included in the sitemap https://defkey.com/WhatMeansShortcut.xml.

14.12.2023

  • Improvement: The "Layout" menu has a new option called "3 columns". It's a "newspaper look" for the shortcut list.
  • Fix: Some program (shortcut list) page elements that would appear bad in certain conditions are re-arranged/fixed.
  • Change: The "menu" buttons moved from search bar to their own row. So search bar is full-width again. In future, I may change this layout to reduce clutter, but I'm not decided on how it will be yet.

12.12.2023

  • New feature: In program pages (shortcut lists of programs), a new "Layout" button is added under the program screenshot. It allows a new layout called "compact". I'm also considering a three column layout option, like in the landscape PDFs generated by the site.
  • Improvement: The sorting button now has a "Sort by familiar actions" option. It'll put familiar looking descriptions on top.

7.12.2023

  • New feature: Shortcut lists can now be sorted by "most liked", "easiest to hardest", "hardest to easiest" and more. Note: When sorting is activated, you lose the sections and headings in that list. That may sometimes make the list unusuable, if the shortcut description only works in certain part of a program.
  • Improvement: When generating PDF from a shorctut list, you can now select a font. For now there are only 2 fonts.

21.11.2023

  • Fix: Articles menu wouldn't show 'enough' articles.
  • Fix: www site wouldn't redirect to non-www site (forgotten when upgrading to .Net Core).
  • Improvement: Some performance improvements for /what-means pages (SQL query splitted from one big query)
  • Improvement: Upgraded to .NET 8.0 from NET 7.0

27.10.2023

  • Change: Look of generated shortcut list PDFs changed a bit (cells now have rounded borders).
  • Change: PDFs shouldn't appear in search engines. I added those to both robots.txt and made their links 'nofollow'.
  • Improvement: In program pages, some shortcut lists have subheadings as plain text. When those are detected (they end with a ':'), they'll become "h3" headings with a proper heading look.
  • Removed: Twitter logo is removed from site footer. Text link is enough, no need to make their advertisement (and it was the old logo anyway) :)

26.10.2023

  • Improvement: Added pagination to /fr page.
  • Fix: Fix the "hardest shortcut" link wouldn't go to hardest shortcut but to the favorite one. A little embarrassing but fixed :-)
  • Fix: Fix "accordions" in shortcut lists doesn't work (don't open or close when clicked.) Hopefully fixed.
  • Improvement: Added a limit to how long a search suggestion would be. That'll block super long lines (which are editing errors) appearing there.

16.10.2023

  • New feature: The "Articles" link on the top navbar is now a menu. It shows latest articles right away.

13.10.2023

  • New feature: Program pages: Added "Tools" section on right. It includes features such as "Go to random shortcut", "Go to hardest shortcut". I will improve it a little more, e.g. it may show a list of hardest shortcuts of that program.
  • Change: The "Tools" box mentioned above takes place of "Latest/Popular programs" and "Latest articles" on the right. These two sections now appear under the comments, at the bottom.

06.10.2023

  • Removed: Removed Microsoft Terminology API references (sadly). Microsoft discontinued Terminology API, an API used to provide translations for programs. Now for the French site, I will be using the remaining: Google Translate API, former translations and my own (not very advanced) French.

05.10.2023

  • New: As the site is now 6 years old, the logo and the look is refreshed. It's not 100% done, I'll probably be updating some design bits as the time passes.

28.08.2023

  • New feature: Now only last 15 comments are shown, to see all comments you'll need to click the link below the last comment. Then it'll show all at once. This is to make pages with lots of comments faster. This filtering feature is only valid for programs; I didn't implement it for news articles, and other types of pages.

09.08.2023

  • Improvement: Added German keyboard layout too Keyboard Tester.
  • Improvement: The underlying language selection logic improved. It'll make adding new languages to website easier (e.g. that's needed for different layouts of Keyboard Tester).

06.08.2023

  • Improvement: The Keyboard tester (found in the Tools menu) now shows the keyboard shortcut you press as a link. You can click it to go related shortcut page.

02.08.2023

  • New feature: Keyboard tester, can be reached from Tools > Keyboard test. The difference from other online testers is, this one shows how many programs use the combination you just pressed.
  • Change: The button layout and names in the site header is changed a bit, to make various functions find easier.

09.07.2023

  • Change: Updated Windows 10 icon on keys to Windows 11.

06.07.2023

  • Improvement: "Rate limiting" to some exposed APIs (to avoid being easily targeted by a DDoS attack).
  • Improvement: It's now possible to change program images in "content management system".

01.07.2023

  • Improvement: In program shortcut lists, "Table of contents" column on the left will now automatically scroll to show current heading, if it has a scroll bar (happens with lots of headings).

30.06.2023

  • New feature: Pagination added for very long shortcut lists (>150 shortcuts). It was a huge problem when a program have hundreds of shortcuts, because both the server and the browser would slow down. It wasn't very simple to implement this due to hyperlinks doesn't know anything about pages around site, and in page.
  • Information: If the shortcut is paged, the "inline search" feature will only search in the current page. I'd try to remove this limitation in the future.

15.06.2023

  • Improvement: When there is no comment, a message is shown in the place of comments: "No comments yet. You can write the first one!".

11.06.2023

  • Improvement: For comments, users now assigned a random name such as "Guest # Ctrl + B". I may change how it looks; though I believe it's better to have unique names by default.
  • Improvement: Guest user names (typed by user or the default random one) now stored in a cookie. That means "Name" field will remember what was typed there, for about 2 weeks.

09.06.2023

  • Fix: /what-means/ URLs with "then" keyword would give 404. Fixed.
  • Improvement: Added Apple favicons.

06.06.2023

  • Improvement: Added some error handling to comments section. In case of an error (flooding, spam words, spam IP, etc.) the page will scroll to error message under the comment box, and also show a popup.
  • Fix: "Last week" counters for the programs was broken. Fixed.

02.06.2023

  • New feature: /what-means/ pages have a comment box now. Example: https://defkey.com/what-means/ctrl-alt-f

27.05.2023

  • Improvement: Comments are now stored in single table (program and news article comments). This means easier comment code management for me. This will soon allow me to add comments section to /what-means/ pages and more.
  • Improvement: Various fixes and optimizations.

20.05.2023

  • Improvement: When voting a shortcut, a faint "loading animation" is displayed until the vote is registered.
  • Improvement: Fix category button shade (it showed a white border after upgrading to Bootstrap 3.x).

18.05.2023

  • Improvement: Bootstrap updated from version 3.0 to 3.4.1. It didn't seem like break anyhing, except I had to make a few CSS adjustments.
  • Improvement: Some code restructure.

16.05.2023

  • Improvement: Flood check for comments.

13.05.2023

  • Improvement: Small under the hood improvements, bug fixes.

08.05.2023

  • New feature: The site is now upgraded from .Net Framework to .NET 7 (Microsoft's latest web development platform). It took a months to make everything smooth again in .NET Core, but hopefully it'll be worth it in the future. Right now, the performance should be better. During the transition, I've reviewed and improved a lot of code (repeating code, not good code, etc.), which'll also help.
  • Nothing else: As I focused on migrating to .NET Core, almost nothing new is added. When I know everything is working well, the next thing I'm working on will be a fresh look for the site.

11.11.2022

  • New feature: Whatmeans pages now show a table of contents. Only for desktop. Example can be seen at: https://defkey.com/what-means/ctrl-a (probably you need to Shift+F5 on Chrome or try a few days later until cache clears).

11.11.2022

  • New feature: Whatmeans pages now limit number of programs to show per category, to see more you can expand it. Example can be seen at: https://defkey.com/what-means/ctrl-a (probably you need to Shift+F5 on Chrome or try a few days later until cache clears).
  • Improvement: Whatmeans pages now show number of programs listed under every category. The program count is shown next to the category name.

02.11.2022

  • New feature: The web site is now installable as PWA (Chrome web browser, Android devices). On Chrome desktop, an install icon appears in the right of the address bar. It doesn't work offline (it won't be wise to cache entire site), except the search home page.
  • New feature: PWA uses the service worker, which means more local caching and faster navigation. It is still work in progress.
  • Improvement: Open Search (typing defkey.com and then pressing Tab in the address bar), will now redirect to user's local language (French, Turkish or English). Earlier all searches done this way would open in English website.

18.10.2022

  • Improvement: Comment delete improvements. Comments that have replies will leave a placeholder when deleted (to keep hierarchy).
  • Internal improvement: I'm working on a feature to send daily application log emails to myself to keep track of errors, warnings in a lot of log lines. This means when something breaks or goes wrong, I'll hopefully know it faster.

14.10.2022

  • Fix: Fixed like/dislike notifications not appearing on articles (non-shortcut, general articles).
  • General fixes and small improvements.

13.10.2022

  • New feature: After shortcuts, articles also support nested replies more than 2 levels.
  • Fix: 'Internal' fixes (program deletion was slow; hopefully faster now).

07.10.2022

  • Fix: On generated PDF documents, some shortcut lines would display wrong additional keys. This was caused by the code that "grouped" shortcuts with same description. Now it should be working fine.
  • Fix: Tha paid Google Translate API that is used by me to generate French shortcut lists used unncessarily. Now the code properly uses items that was translated earlier from English to French, and only uses Google Translate if necessary.
  • Next on the line: Support for nested replies in articles.

04.10.2022

  • Fix: Comments were ordered in wrong way, now the newest are on the top again. The inner replies are ordered in reverse though; maybe this is better (that's more like forum threads).

03.10.2022

  • New feature: Comment system revamped, now it fully supports nested replies on shortcut list pages. Earlier, replies would only go one level deep.
  • Improvement: "OP" (original poster) tag now works properly in replies.
  • Improvement: Email notifications for replies are now localized for French and Turkish pages. It was all in English.

26.09.2022

  • Improvement: Added touchpad icon for PlayStation controller.
  • Fix: If a shortcut description had html tags in it, the "underlining shortcut letter" function would underline html tags. Now it'll skip html descriptions.
  • Fix: (Internal) Microsoft Terminology API weren't working because they use https now, fixed.
  • Improvement: Error (404 and 500) pages were displayed only in English. Now they support Turkish and French.

23.09.2022

  • New feature: Added a few links to mobile "menu" area. Earlier the menu button used to show just the Search bar.
  • Fix: 404 and 500 error pages are localized now (Turkish and French, in addition to English).
  • Fix: Fixed a bug that panel heading would stay enlarged after clearing inline seach in mobile.

22.09.2022

  • New feature: Added an anchor link to the panel headings (secondary headings in programs). It works like in the Microsoft and Google documentation websites, doesn't copy anything to clipboard when clicked, only scrolls that heading to the top. You can copy the link by right clicking on it.
  • Fix: When user clicked an entry in the table of contents, the URL wouldn't update with anchor link like #23452 . Now it does.
  • Fix: Transparent "hero" images wouldn't display correctly in programs. Fixed.
  • Change: From now, program icons won't be resized to bigger size if they're smaller than default size (240x240). I don't want to blur them out if they're very small - pixeled icons are better to me. This will affect only newly added programs and games.

15.09.2022

  • Fix: Some game controller buttons weren't spaced properly in some places.

10.09.2022

  • New feature: In shortcut lists, "Scroll spy" indicates where you are as you scroll the page. In desktop, current heading is shown as bold. In mobile, the top sticky navigation dropdown bar shows current heading.
  • Improvement: Updated jQuery to 3.6.0
  • Fix: Small improvements on controller buttons.

30.08.2022

  • New feature: After Xbox controllers buttons, I have added PlayStation buttons too. All will be recognized as buttons and will be clickable once a few console games added. By clicking buttons or button combinations, you'll be able to check what that button or button combination does in other games.

19.08.2022

  • Fix: Gamepad button names will now use better names (e.g. "Right thumb stick" instead of rthumb).
  • Removed: Facebook and Instagram accounts and their links at the site footer. They were inactive and I don't use Facebook anymore.

17.08.2022

  • New feature: The site now fully "supports" Xbox gamepad buttons. That means they'll be displayed as icons (SVG format) in lists, and I'll start to add console hotkeys. PlayStation controller buttons will follow very soon.

28.07.2022

  • Fix: A few changes to allow better searching of mouse shortcuts. E.g. to search "Left click", you can now type "left click" with spaces or "left-click". Earlier it would only recognize "leftclick".

02.06.2022

  • Fix: The new "Like article" part's title wasn't correct, fixed.

01.06.2022

  • New feature: News articles now have like dislike buttons, just like program shortcuts pages.

26.04.2022

  • Improvement: Shortcuts tab in Search results now include single key shortcuts.
  • Improvement: Shortcuts tab in search results will now limit number of programs per shortcut, and suggest to "See all" if more than 50 programs use a shortcut.
  • Improvement: Added an information box on single letter shortcuts: Note to developers: As single letter shortcuts are used by various accessibility software, it is recommended to make them optional/customizable in your program.

18.04.2022

  • Improvement: "WASD" keys often used by games and they can now be shown like a single key. Just like "arrow keys". It won't affect shortcuts added in the past, and won't be used by me if their difference is not only movement direction.
  • Fix: A few fixes for RSS feed.

12.04.2022

  • New feature: RSS feeds are now available, with links in the site footer. The main RSS feed (defkey.com/rss) is for shortcuts. The other one is for articles (defkey.com/rss/articles). Only in English for now.

07.01.2022

  • Fixed: Fixed some of the "filtered shortcut pages" would get corrupted and show only a few shortcuts.

29.11.2021

  • New feature: Users now can like / dislike entire shortcut pages. The new buttons appear next to colorful share buttons, in the end of the every article. This has a limit (8 programs) for every IP in some time to avoid spamming.

01.11.2021

  • New feature: Keys will be underlined when mouse is hovered on shortcut descriptions. E.g. for Ctrl + C, the description will be displayed as Copy.

20.09.2021

  • Improvement: Program info added to PDF Options page.
  • Improvement: Program icon is now displayed in PDFs.
  • Fixed: Non-filtered PDFs' title would be shown as "filtered". Fixed.
  • Fixed: Some of the hreflangs (meta tags that tell different localizations of the same pages to search engines) weren't absolute URLs.

18.09.2021

  • New feature: PDF output can be customized now by clicking "PDF options..." (new landscape option, row color and displaying of page number can be changed). It is found under "..." button in any shortcut list.

31.08.2021

  • Improvement: Added "Last updated" date to end of the PDF documents.

28.08.2021

  • New feature: Download as PDF functionality for shortcut lists. It is found under "..." button. PDFs are generated as basic two-column lists, without any distraction. I used portrait A4 size for the PDF file, a landscape option may be provided in future. The new function respects the "Full list" / "Top 20 shortcut list" option.

15.07.2021

  • Small improvements to content management system.

06.07.2021

  • Improvement: Sitemap is split into four parts. defkey.com/sitemap.xml is now an index file for these parts.

05.07.2021

  • New feature: If a program's shortcut has a long description, they'll have a "Expand >>" link. It'll display the long description when clicked. To open it new page, middle-click on that link.
  • Change: Sitemap for new individual shortcut pages will include more shortcuts, even if they don't have long descriptions. The reason for that is to help people find specific shortcut descriptions on Google easier. New sitemap exclusive to individual shortcut pages is here: https://defkey.com/shortcutdetails.xml

28.06.2021

  • Small improvements to new individual shortcut pages.

25.06.2021

  • New feature: Important or frequently searched shortcuts of programs will have their individual page. This aims to make finding e.g. when you type Google "What Ctrl + B does in MS Word". The following feature will be individual pages for important shortcut descriptions.

20.05.2021

  • New feature: In non-US program pages, shortcuts such as Ctrl + [ will have a "i" icon. When hovered, a popup will appear and the equivalent key on local keyboard will be suggested to user.

05.05.2021

  • Improvement: 404 error pages will now suggest programs, if the beginning of the URL text is found in some programs' name.
  • Improvement: "Left Windows" and "Right Windows" keys will be recognized as keys. Some keyboards such as Ducky One 2 Mini has it. Until now, only "Windows" key would be used.

03.05.2021

  • Improvement: Searching for a shortcut id will directly forward you to that shortcut in the program. Shortcut ids can be seen when sharing shortcuts, etc.
  • Small internal improvements.

11.04.2021

  • Improvement: Removed an table from database. This should result faster load times when requesting a non-cached page.

25.03.2021

  • Fix: Shortcut action comparisons will be case-insensitive now, because it affects "fuzzy match scores" more than I thought. The action is probably same no matter which case it's written in.
  • Fix: A "cache clearing" function was slowing down voting (the vote button would turn to green after a 1,5 second delay). It should be faster now.

24.03.2021

  • Fix: Minor fixes and improvements to Shortcut Finder feature.
  • Fix: A "cache clearing" function was slowing down voting (the vote button would turn to green after a 1,5 second delay). It should be faster now.

19.03.2021

  • Fix: Various fixes to new Shortcut Finder feature.
  • Addition: New Shortcut Finder URLs added to sitemap.xml

18.03.2021

  • New feature: A new tool will allow developers to find most preferred shortcut for speficifed action. It can be reached by clicking "Shortcut Finder" on site menu. Note: It will take a few days to populate similarity information. Until that time, the tool may be less accurate.
  • Information: The Shortcut Finder feature will also appear in search results in the rightmost tab.

26.01.2021

  • New feature: Shortcut lists can now be saved as plain text (.txt) file. This option can be accessed under new "..." button next to inline search bar. New feature works properly in all three languages we support (English, French, Turkish).
  • Information: New plain text feature is not a replacement for "Saving as PDF". I'm considering this for future.
  • Change: I've made program page fonts bigger for both desktop and mobile. I'll probably make the same for "What Means Key" pages and regular articles.
  • Change: Some change made on shortcut keys' apperance on mobile. They're now a bit narrower to accommodate bigger font on mobile.
  • Change: I have turned off Ezoic cache, because of a security issue. My login cookie was shared with random people, in very rare ocassions. The site is directly served from IIS server now, and interestingly this seems to be faster.
  • Improvement: Vote buttons have ":active" color now, to indicate your click/touch is registered, before it turns to green.
  • Fix: Some keys (Enter, Shift, Tab) would appear with icons when they shouldn't (e.g. in browser title). This is fixed.

17.01.2021

This is a mostly maintenance update for newly added vote feature.

  • Improvement: Updated Jquery, Slick.
  • Fix: Mobile users would 'accidentally' vote by touching star icon. That was a design issue and fixed. Now vote doesn't count while up and down vote arrows aren't visible.
  • Fix: Filtering program shortcuts was suggested even if there wasn't enough votes or interactions. Fixed.
  • Fix: Some CSS problems fixed.
  • Improvement: Periods won't be allowed on page URLs anymore. IIS doesn't like such URLs and they would make some news articles give server errors, if I didn't check after publishing.
  • Improvement: Vote points will now show decimal places and groups when necessary.
  • Information: Added Microsoft Clarity analytics code.
  • New feature: Internal - I'll log some events and warnings in the database from now on. For now, it work only for votes.

01.2021

  • New feature: Inline search now higlights the search string on lines found with yellow color. This was added in previous release but I've forgotten to mention.

06.01.2021

  • New feature: Individual shortcuts can be voted now. The score from these votes is used to determine "top" shortcuts.
  • New feature: In program pages, shortcuts with higher votes and interactions will get a orange star on their left. Shortcut votes has 80%, interactions (copy button, embed button presses) has 20% weight.
  • Fix: A few dark mode fixes.
  • New feature: For editors (me) It's now much easier to add additional pictures to program pages. It means I'll put more screenshots from game hotkey menus when I can do it.
  • Improvement: Change in showing "Top 20 shortcut" link conditions.

22.12.2020

  • Improvement: In program pages, "copy" button and "embed" button will both be counted as an interaction (earlier it was just copy button, I erroneously said before it was embed button). This number is used to determine which shortcuts are important for a program.
  • Improvement: Shortcut recommendation page will now let me know from which program user has clicked to "Recommend shortcut". Sometimes users suggest me adding specific shortcuts wihout saying program name. In fact, this feature is a "global" feature but maybe wording was a bit misleading. Wording is also changed. Recommend shortcut page will also show correct number of shortcuts of site (rounded by 50), instead of hard-coded number.
  • 2021 has almost come. Happy new year!

14.12.2020

  • New feature: Programs with long list of shortcuts now offer "shortened" version only with 20 essential shortcuts (e.g. try going to Microsoft Word shortcuts). These 20 shortcuts are selected based user interaction (user clicked over embed button). That can sound like a weird way of determining "essential" shortcuts, but users click that button out of curiosity generally on important shortcuts. This feature surely will be refined and better evaluation (with multiple ways) of shortcuts will be added in future.

10.11.2020

  • Change: This is not in code, but I will be devoting more time to the site for development and content from now on.
  • Change: If user have an ad blocker extension enabled on desktop, a "Donate" button will be shown in the bottom right. This is only shown in program pages and only to if ads are blocked. I don't plan to show it to ad-seeing visitors. Note: Ad blockers are fine, we don't block any content, nor display pop-ups to disable it.
  • Improvement: In program pages, some of the program information will be hidden by default. The information pane can be expanded by clicking "More information".

25.08.2020

  • Improvement: When somebody writes a new comment to a program, comment count on the top of the page will hopefully show the correct number (that number will be taken with ajax from server, even if the page is cached)
  • Improvement: Copy button in What Means Shortcut pages will now copy shortcut key text, too. Those pages have less HTML code now, as I removed repetitive text in code.

10.08.2020

  • Change: A "Close" button added to shortcut URL sharing box.
  • Change: Comments look like a question will get question mark instead of generic message icon.

13.07.2020

  • Improvement: Navigation links in "Contents" section in program pages now has URLs for right click > Copy. Earlier they didn't allow this, their anchor link was javascript:void(0). Those links still work the same way, scrolling with JavaScript without reloading the page. It is just dummy link is changed to a real URL for people who want to copy exact location of a header.

26.06.2020

  • New feature: The new filter feature is now available for "Easiest shortcuts" page too: https://defkey.com/rankings/easiest-keyboard-shortcuts

18.06.2020

  • Fix: New filter function in Most used shortcuts page would show same shortcuts in different ways. For example Ctrl + Alt + B would be also listed as Alt + Ctrl + B. This is fixed, by removing duplicates in list. Only most used version of shortcut will be visible.
  • Fix: The second 'custom shortcut' text box in new filter function in Most used shortcuts page wasn't working. Fixed.

13.06.2020

  • New feature: Most used shortcuts page now has a filter function that allows to specify which keys should be included and excluded. You can also select number of keys in shortcut and sort in reverse order, so unpopular shortcuts come first. This feature will probably be useful for software developers who are looking to find popular or not popular shortcuts for their programs.
  • Known issue: In dark mode, some of the texts become almost invisible. Some css is messed up, and I couldn't find and clean it up yet.

30.05.2020

  • Improvement: In-page search now hides empty headings if there are no matches under them.

26.05.2020

This build includes various fixes for known minor problems.

  • Improvement: In-page search now supports wildcard (*) character.
  • Improvement: In-page search now expands panels if they're closed. This happens once; if you close a panel it won't be re-expanded.
  • Improvement: In-page search filter can be cancelled by pressing ESC in anywhere of page.
  • Improvement: Some JS code was left in page HTML. They're moved to external js.
  • Fix: URLs with e.g. #comment-2142 wouldn't scroll to related comment sometimes (because comments were loaded later if they're not latest in a cached page). Fixed.
  • Fix: Comment section will reload in correct language. Why does it reload? Because the page is cached sometimes along with comments and comment like counts, even though I flush the cache after new comments. It only reloads after if there are new comments / (dis)likes.

20.05.2020

  • New feature: In program pages, filtering shortcuts with a keyword is now possible. In other words, you can now perform a in-page search by using the search box below the program picture, instead of using browser's Ctrl + F (find) feature. This introduces another new element in the page, which I want to be careful about. But hopefully it does not make the page look cluttered.

15.05.2020

  • Change: Dark mode has a brighter font now.
  • Fix: Non-existent news URLs would return 500, now they return a proper 404.

10.05.2020

  • New feature: Some new stats in mainpage: Number of programs and number of games in the database.
  • Improvement: In French version of the site, French key names like Maj, Espace will work. They'll not autocomplete though.
  • Improvement: In French version of the site, errors in search page (such as not displaying French name of a program) are resolved.

29.04.2020

  • Improvement: Improvement on parsing shortcut lists will make long lists to open faster. This is thanks to reduced usage of regular expressions when adding html tags and translating shortcuts in C# code.

25.04.2020

  • Information: The site is now running on a Windows VPS (it runs just this site). Earlier, it was on a shared hosting.
  • Improvement: Site search now uses fulltext search feature of SQL server for searching in shortcut descriptions. This works much faster, gives results almost instantly. For queries with words consist of three or less characters, usual SQL LIKE operator used in conjuction with SQL CONTAINS (fulltext search).
  • Fix: "Shortcut embed box" would display white background in sites with dark background. Now it doesn't use any background color outside of its border line.

15.04.2020

  • New feature: Meta-description (text that appears in Google search results) will be auto-generated for shortcuts. This works only in English for now, as I'm testing it. The function that generates the text consider shortcut popularity, easyness and sometimes give some information about the number of programs using that shortcut.
  • New feature: In addition to ASP.NET output cache, the site will cache some of the popular programs in memory. This cache may survive longer than output cache and only caches program's shortcut lines; so controller code is run actually.
  • Fix: Comments in news articles wouldn't appear in French version of the site.
  • Information: I'm preparing to move to a VPS from the shared hosting I've been using since the beginning of the site. The switch will be done near the end of this month, probably.

01.02.2020

  • New feature: A new "copy to clipboard" button for "what means key" pages.

30.12.2019

  • New feature: Comments will now show 'OP' (Original poster) or 'Admin' tags according to poster.
  • New feature: The shortcut rating in What Means Key pages will have one of these four colors depending on the rating: Red (worst one), yellow, green, and orange (easiest to press).

18.12.2019

  • New feature: French translations page (https://defkey.com/fr/raccourcisfrancais) now shows two additional percentage bars, indicating how many of important programs are translated into French.

18.12.2019

  • Improvement: French translations can be made faster with new CMS improvements.

10.12.2019

  • Improvement: In French site, French key names will look localized (such as Maj for Shift, Echap for Esc, etc.). French URLs for such keys will stay in English.

26.11.2019

  • New feature: New rankings "Programs with easiest shortcuts", "most popular shortcuts" and "easiest shortcuts". They're of course generated, not static.
  • Change: Article text in program pages are now a bit larger.
  • Change: Dark mode button now looks more like a keyboard button.
  • Change: The "breadcrumb" is now acts as a link in shortcut and news article pages.
  • Fix: Various fixes.

11.10.2019

  • New feature: Dark mode button. If system settings is in dark mode, the site prefers dark mode. Button is only visible in desktop resolutions.
  • New feature: I'm adding new top shortcut lists such as "programs with easiest shortcuts", "most popular shortcuts" and "easiest shortcuts". Currently only first one works.

08.10.2019

  • Fix: Fixed in What Means Key pages, one program would appear more than once , if it uses same shortcut multiple times (this is fixed only for program names under "Popular" heading.) For example if Ctrl + X used for 5 different actions in Excel, earlier it would be listed multiple times in "Popular programs using this shortcut" list.
  • New feature: This feature will appear in a day, after data is populated. Shortcut rank (how popular a shortcut is among programs) is displayed in "What Means Key" pages, along with similarly popular shortcuts.

18.09.2019

  • Fix: Fixed navbar jumping when page loading. All pages now always have a scroll bar to avoid this jumping.
  • New feature: Programs now show an "Average shortcut easiness" score in percent. It is shown in Program information pane on the right.

07.09.2019

  • Fix: A few bugs are fixed in "force language" feature.
  • Optimization: Various pages make 4-5 less DB requests now, meaning a tiny bit faster page loading. MemoryCache is used to keep some objects like latest articles, categories in cache. There is also CDN cache for most of the site except homepage, so this won't make a any difference for CDN cached pages.
  • Optimization: Site favicon uses SVG logo in Firefox. Chrome doesn't support SVG for favicon, so it uses webp alternative.
  • Optimization: Fixed some database queries that return too much data.

25.08.2019

  • Optimization: During loading home page, carousel image doesn't cause content to jump anymore (especially in mobile).
  • Optimization: Homepage should load faster now, as first image of carousel is loaded with rel=preload.

19.08.2019

  • New feature: News article images are also .webp now, with all older posts included. Most of the site uses .webp images now, instead of jpg.
  • New feature: 404 and 500 error pages are now showing customized pages instead of generic IIS / ASP.NET error pages. Exception details won't be shown to public anymore.

07.08.2019

  • Updates for news article pages: The article header wasn't in correct column, it was page-wide. Fixed. Right side now shows recommended articles. Mobile version shows comments counts like desktop page.
  • All icons used in site are moving to total of 2 sprites: One css sprite for colorful and custom-made icons (mouse icons), and one woff2 font icon for all other icons. This means less http requests and faster page load.
  • Site look in Internet Explorer was overlooked by me. I made a few corrections the font used (woff2 isn't supported by IE) and fixing wrong color in the Category navbar button.

31.07.2019

  • New feature: On slow connections, in program pages and in mobile resoultion, big heading image will show a very low-res version of the image until it loads. This image is in webp format and about 300 bytes in size. It is embedded to every program page's html, so it doesn't cause any additional request to server. Lot of work for such a tiny feature :-)

30.07.2019

  • Fix: Some small mobile resolutions weren't looking good. Site will now look better with iPhone 5 / SE. It'll even look fine with devices 250px width screen like Nokia 8110 4G.

27.07.2019

  • New feature: "What means key" pages now calculate a rating for every shortcut, depending on how easy to press it. The score is affected by key count, modifier key count, distance of right-left side keys when used together, right-left modifier key specified (like Right Shift), etc. and also affected if it's a rarely used shortcut. The resulting rating may not be very accurate every time, for now.
  • Change: Furter optimizations of loading of resources like JavaScript and CSS. Data transferred in mobile devices is smaller. There are still render-blocking elements, but it shouldn't be a problem in a normal connection.
  • Change: You won't be able to click an hero image, if it's not going to be displayed distinctively larger. Means reduced an unnecessary distraction.
  • Change: Shortcut embed code is much smaller now with a total transfer of ~10KB gzipped, and it makes only about 2-3 requests to server when embedded in a webpage. Jquery isn't used anymore in it, and only necessary bootstrap classes are used. Lastly icon is used in webp format for supported browsers. Earlier it was downloading about 170KB of data and making about 10 requests.

18.07.2019

  • Change: Some optimizations about when JS code loaded. They're mostly loaded after page loads, means faster performance.
  • Change: I've also tried to reduce number of requests to server. Mouse icons are now SVG sprite (one image file).

11.07.2019

  • New feature: All program "hero" images are converted to .webp now. It's a newer image format by Google that can compress images much better than .jpg. Unsupported browsers will show .jpg version of the image instead.
  • New feature: Program images can be clicked and larger version of the image can be viewed (Fancybox is used). Larger version is supposed to show .jpg version (which is generally original one). I don't want to have too many distracting features on any page but I believe this won't hurt too much.

01.07.2019

  • New feature: .webp images can now be used for programs' "hero" images.

20.06.2019

  • New feature: Updated programs will now show what is updated in the information panel.

22.05.2019

  • New feature: I've created a French version of site. There's no French homepage but shortcuts will be translated to French in time. For those shortuts, all site will appear in French. I'll add translation functionality for shortcuts for volunteers in future.

4.03.2019

  • New feature: Embed fuction: Individual shortcuts can be embedded on web pages. The widget is responsive, supports English and Turkish languages.
  • New feature: Searching for shortcuts will now suggest variations of a shortcut (if they exist in database). E.g. if you start typing Alt + Ctrl + E, you'll see Ctrl + Alt + E as a suggestion.
  • Change: Speed optimizations in program and shortcut pages. Some SQL queries was too big and slow.
  • Change: Fixed some errors in "Similar programs" list. The list will now show more "similar" programs. Similarity is calculated by category and name similarity.

21.02.2019

  • New feature: Pages for e.g Ctrl + Alt + E and Alt + Ctrl + E will list same results. This should be valid for all combinations of modifier keys like Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Windows, Super, Cmd, Fn, etc. An information will appear at the bottom of the page, if page concatenates such shortcuts.

31.01.2019

  • New feature: Comments and comment like counts will be displayed latest, even if page is from older cache. The page will load with comments first, and if cache doesn't include some commments, it'll dynamically load them.

27.01.2019

  • New feature: Shortcut lists: Mobile hero images now look like news articles'.
  • Change: Fixed some 404s in sitemap.xml. Sitemap won't show shortcuts used less than 3 times. Therefore, it's size is greatly reduced.
  • Change: Changed some CDNs to Google CDNs. I've tried to reduce number of different CDNs used, to eliminate unnecessary DNS lookups.

17.01.2019

  • New feature: Program pages now have a small section on the right side called "Featured shortcut". It shows single keyboard shortcut based on that program's most shared shortcut.

12.01.2019

  • New feature: We're trying Ezoic now as ad partner, so now the site is behind a CDN. We'd be glad to know if site is slow or fast for you, and how is your experience about ad placements in our site.
  • Change: Search now doesn't redirect to program directly, if any other matches found in shortcut descriptions. Prior to this change, it was impossible to search for a description, if a program with similar name existed.

07.01.2019

  • New feature: Shortcut counts now shown in shortcut article pages.

10.11.2018

  • New feature: Comment spammer IPs are blocked. They were generating lot of traffic.

14.10.2018

  • Change: Changes on shortcut URL copy button. It now copies with some text.

09.10.2018

  • New feature: Search function now searches for certain combinations like Alt + Ctrl, Ctrl + Alt...

08.10.2018

  • New feature: Comments will now show url texts as proper links.

07.10.2018

  • Fix: Thumbnails on main page would sometimes have blank spaces between them.

04.10.2018

  • New feature: In "what means key" pages, we now list popular programs first. Then all programs are listed by category.

07.09.2018

  • Change: New ads in "what means key" pages (random inline ads, a video ad).

27.05.2018

  • New feature: "Follow us" buttons on right side of home page.

26.05.2018

  • New feature: We have a new ad on shortcut pages, it's sticky on right when page is scrolled down.
  • Change: "Most popular and latest shortcuts" section has now 6 items instead of 5. I changed this to fill blank area on main page.

24.05.2018

  • New feature: GPDR has come, and we now have a privacy policy. It can be reached from the very bottom of every page.

22.05.2018

  • New feature: Amazon affilate ads added in English shortcut pages.

18.05.2018

  • Change: Moment.js will be loaded from CDNs, when possible (so I will spend less data on my hosting and serve files faster).

14.05.2018

  • New feature: Latest five articles will now be shown on right side of shortcut pages.

12.05.2018

  • Fix: Some "internal" fixes on shortcut recognition (from now, page up/down can be used as a one key) and CMS pages.

07.05.2018

  • Change: Share buttons on desktop are now bigger, and rounded square instead of circle.

06.05.2018

  • Change: Sticky ads removed, I put inline ads instead in shortcut pages. Sticky ads aren't permitted by Google Adsense .

29.04.2018

  • Change: On shortcut pages, right ad is now "sticky", meaning it always show even if you scroll. I'm really sorry if this affects your experience. As most websites we need to display advertisements, to meet hosting and development costs. Ads will not go out of control.

28.04.2018

  • Change: Search tips in search results page (when nothing found) are localized now for Turkish and English.
  • Change: Some improvements in content management.

25.04.2018

  • New feature: Shortcut pages will now show current program icon, on top-left "Program information" area.

18.04.2018

  • Change: In shortcut pages, "table of contents" moved to left for desktop. It also has scrollbar for now.

17.04.2018

  • New feature: New search landing page at defkey.com/search .

09.04.2018

  • New feature: Search now suggests program names and shortcuts, after you type two or more characters.

07.04.2018

  • Fix: Fixed a slow loading in main page. A query was lagging too much.

04.04.2018

  • Fix: Fixed title problem in "What Means This Shortcut?" pages. Some keys like Shift were erroneously displayed with html tags in title.

23.03.2018

  • Fix: Fixed date position on "Top programs" list on the right side.

11.03.2018

  • New feature: Most popular page now shows weekly popular items.
  • Fix: Some characters in shortcuts were causing 404 errors in "what means" pages.