I took a very close look at briefcake.com current data and found couple interesting insights. But most important one, is that ...

We found 28 free users, that have more than 100 feeds. One of them has 16852 feeds, second biggest free user has 2608.

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Since new premium users from briefcake.com are hard to come by these days. We're experimenting with ads in emails for free users.

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Experimenting with lipgloss library for stoic cli app! Looks really glamorous. #buildinpublic

github.com/skatkov/stoic/…

grab it posh version of stoic utility here:
github.com/skatkov/stoic/…

5 hour lost during rails 7 update to find this error :-\

Mailer worked just fine with this code in Rails 6. But was completely broken in Rails 7...

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+ 2 premium briefcake users last week!

Doesn't seem like much, but still way more than couple of months ago.

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briefcake.com has so much emails collected over the years, but I never reached out. It felt too scammy.

But if I operate a free service, I'm obligated to sent out at least 1 email a month. Maybe more? Right?

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Based on previous feedback -- here is a welcome screen version 2!

Is it welcoming enough now?
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BUMPED OUT! SERIOUSLY! 2 refunds in a week.

Planning to roll out these improvements in near future:
- faster feed detection (with less chances of timeouts)
- higher chances to detect feeds on pages
- dealing with youtube 404 errors
- instagram out of beta

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There are good days, but there are also bad days.

One refund and a second user close to refund.

- some new issues with Youtube integration.
- Instagram is still in beta and that annoys users

I guess, it's bug fixing time!
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Working on improving onboarding flow. Project receives a lot of new registration, unfortunately not a lot of people stick around.

This is a new "welcome" screen for newly registered users. is this welcoming enough ?:)

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I will not be sending those ~90000 lines of CSS and HTML code over email anymore.

This also eases my maintenance burden.

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Acorn framework for email templates is cool. But still requires a lot of testing and tweaking!

Really enjoy this minimalistic and simplistic template that we came up with. Works nice in dark mode too!

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Can't even start very simple Rails application on @render.

Logs are not helpful, support is too busy to help, they also have bugs in their pipeline. There is so much that could be handled better here.

Migrating to convox.com ...

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Rebuild newsletter template with Acorn framework.

It's a:
- self-contained html file
- no additinal dependencies (no pre-mailer, no tailwindcss)
- guaranteed work with all email clients

It was ages since I had to do table based layout :P

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I have never seen app crashing so hard because of missing icon for android devices.

*facepalm*

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@nleonid is doing amazing progress in modernizing design of briefcake.com. Main app already has some new screens too - I'm excited!

More to come!

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My worker dyno's started swapping memory.

So I just plugged in jemalloc-buildpack and updated to ruby 3, if that doesn't help - I guess I'll have to bump dyno to more memory.

Not a lot of time to debug such issues...

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+ esbuild
- webpack

+ tailwindcss v3
- tailwindcss v1

Took me 3 attempts to actually migrate.

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+ esbuild
- webpack

Took me 3 attempts to actually finish it ;)

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