I think I like Playwright for e2e tests 🤔

Conclusion tomorrow.

Along with more on how I lost leads due to a broken landing page. Stay tuned 😉

#buildinpublic

Friendly reminder: simplicity is key.

Needed notifications for a dialog. With all bells and whistles, of course. Installed libs, quickly ran into problems, got frustrated, and reverted everything.

Went for a walk.

Implemented a simple alert. Done.

#buildinpublic

🎯 What are your goals for this week? 🎯

And like last time, I'll come back to you next Sunday and we'll have a look at how your week went 💪

#buildinpublic

Okay, enough is enough.

It's time for automated end-to-end tests 😒

A fellow indie maker just pointed out that my trial buttons don't work anymore. 🤦🏼‍♂️

That's the second hickup in a week and it's a MAJOR one. Motivation enough to at least test the basics.

#buildinpublic

Small piece of Twitter Card knowledge I learned today:

If your Twitter Card image is inside a folder disallowed by your robots.txt, Twitter won't load the image.

#buildinpublic

Follow-up to:

Friendly reminder: focus!

Yesterday, I spent way too much time playing/ struggling with an emoji picker component.

...instead of concentrating on getting the basic Tweet editor I was working on up and running. Don't be like me! 😑

#buildinpublic

Quick update on my LinkedIn post performance around my new freelance career.

The next two performed significantly worse than my first one.

Possible explanations:
👉 Technical topic, less "personal"
👉 Vacation time
👉 German LinkedIn 😉

#buildinpublic

Time to add engagement features to Birdspotter's search results.

Introducing the "like" and "retweet" options.

Next up: reply and quote tweet.

#buildinpublic

Let's do this a little differently.

It's Monday and by now, you should have seen about a dozen "what are you doing" tweets. I'll ask you the same.

👉 What are your goals for this week?

And next Sunday, I'll come back to you and we'll see how your week went.

#buildinpublic

Yesterday, I started a new personal blog. Writing was way easier, because it's something I'm very passionate about.

And again, at about 600 words, I felt the post was complete.

I have notes for more than 30 more posts of that size. Let's see what Google thinks.

#buildinpublic

It's interesting how often one sees the statement that freelancing is an "easy and predictable" option in your indie portfolio.

It's not.

It's a product and a business like any other. With all the dependencies, ambiguities, volatilities, chores, and problems.

#buildinpublic

Friendly reminder: you don't have to code everything yourself 😉

Today, I almost coded some nasty OAuth authorization and signature stuff from scratch.

Then I found ScribeJava and productivity went all 🚀

#buildinpublic

Well, yes, there is a difference between Twitter and LinkedIn.

Yesterday, I posted my first serious text on LinkedIn to announce my new job as a freelance consultant.

Let's look at the numbers 👇

#buildinpublic

"What are hundreds of stored results good for if I can't search them?"

Always listen to your customers, they'll tell you what to work on next 😅

Introducing result search for Birdspotter 🔍

#buildinpublic

Do you know a service that provides a RSS feed plus an API to fill it?

Zapier is too expensive, Make doesn't act as feed source, RSS[.]com is podcast only, FetchRSS and RSS[.]app only scrape other sites.

And I really don't want to start a new side project 😆

#buildinpublic

Is it just me or are other indie hackers not talking much about their day jobs?

Or put differently: not talking about themselves as a product.

I think I'm gonna change that and will annoy you with posts about freelance bureaucracy and LinkedIn-marketing.

#buildinpublic

Friendly reminder: most likely, there's a simpler solution than the one you have in mind.

In-text search is finally up next for Birdspotter and I instantly thought of Elasticsearch.

Which is just overkill. Because PostgreSQL has a simple text search built-in 👀

#buildinpublic

How to reach a single customer via email?

Stupid question, I know. Hear me out.

I welcome someone to a trial. And also include some hints to get more value out of the product.

No response. And I don't know if it's just no answer or the spam filter.

So...?

#buildinpublic

Transitioning from 15y of employment to a new freelance career takes up more resources than expected.

At least my new, personal landing page is up. A lot of bureaucracy is still ahead.

Some bugfixes for @Birdspotter_net are live as well.

#buildinpublic

When you're using your own product, the great thing is that you spot annoyances yourself.

Even if it's the small things. Like, when one additional button saves you two clicks.

#buildinpublic