Log #4: Shiny objects
Delivery Ravens
A decent chunk of the project time I spent this week was on updating and fixing styling across the Delivery Ravens app, mostly just bits: fixing colours, removing unnecessary shadows, and making sure everything follows the same theme.
But my main task this week was updating the transactional emails to look nice. If I had been updating just the transactional emails (for confirming email addresses or whatever else), that probably wouldn’t be a good use of my time. However, the delivery email – the one that customers receive to download a digital product they’ve just bought – is a pretty important interface for the service, so spending time there makes sense.
And so I finally got to play with Maizzle,
which allows you to build and style an email using
standard HTML and Tailwind CSS.
Then once you run npm run build, some magic happens to turn it into the
esoteric HTML you need to support email clients’ limited rendering engines.
While I thought I’d be experimenting for a while trying to build a nice design, I only scratched the surface; the example transaction email is already good (and fairly close to the site’s theme) so I just tweaked it before integrating the output into an email template for all transactional and delivery emails:
I don’t have a screenshot of the old style, so just imagine a single line of text saying “Hi, here’s your link to download your product”, followed by a large blue button labeled “Download” right beneath it. The new one looks much better, no?
Where are the makers?
Last week, I wondered “Where are the people building cool products?” (and sharing authentic stuff). As far as I can tell, the short answer is that they’ve scattered, mostly away from Twitter to Mastodon, Bluesky, and private communities.
The peak of Indie Hacker Twitter, where people would share anything and everything about what they’re building, has passed it appears. There are other reasons for the change in behaviour, of course. ‘Building in public’ became synonymous with ‘building an audience’ and using Twitter as a marketing channel, rather than a place to share and connect with people working on cool stuff.
There are still interesting people on Twitter that I’ll continue following, but I definitely need to trim down who I follow.
Quite a few people I followed before have moved to Bluesky, or at least, they post more to Bluesky than other places, so I think I’ll try engaging there. Using domains as handles is a cool idea too.
Shiny objects in mirror are closer than they appear
The most interesting thing that happened this week (project wise) was receiving an email from a Map of Strengh user. They were wondering why a gym they submitted to the directory a while back wasn’t listed on the site, asking whether the site is being maintained:
Just checking to see if the site is still being maintained. I think it is great that there is this resource out there and I appreciate what you are doing with it.
I had to admit to them that it wasn’t. I genuinely don’t remember the last time I touched it; it’s just online, lingering as one of my inactive projects while its data rots. Its uptime is impressive though.
But receiving that email sent my mind racing with ideas to revive Map of Strength and make it actually good while not requiring hours of my time to maintain the data. It’s something I thought about a few months ago too – I even bought a better domain and put together some notes last time the thought bubbled.
The question is, should I do it? Is reviving an old project and rebuilding it using what you’ve learned along with some new technology shiny object syndrome? Even if it isn’t, is it a distraction? The devil on my shoulder says “it’ll only take a few weeks, then you can work on other stuff”.
There are too many things I want to work on. And when you’re still searching for revenue-generating products, it’s far too tempting to switch between projects.
And then when I keep thinking, I haven’t even bothered trying to catch the AI wave (at least not now that it’s actually good). It feels like I’m going to regret it if I don’t. I’ve seen how this plays out before – I saw it with the internet, and then again with smartphones. Am I stupid?!
What’s next
As the number of tasks to turn Delivery Ravens into something I’m not embarassed by drops, I’m going to funnel more of my project time into the info product so it’s roughly a 50:50 split.
- Keep working on the info product
- Progress towards Delivery Ravens 1.0