As we get closer to the Christmas holidays, I wanted to clear the deck and tune in where I want to focus on the most.

There are many projects I’d like to work on and I feel that sometimes my lines are spread a little too thin — or in other words, I’d like to work on everything at the same time. However, this is one area in my character flaw that I won’t change. Because it works for me — even if at times it feels I am neglecting a project. It’s far from it and everything I work on is always in my head, twirling around in that background process.

Sublime Feed

This has been my biggest focus for the past 2 weeks. I really want to get Sublime Feed ready for launch. On what date? Perhaps end of November — so let’s see.

It’s been a super busy time with getting features in here that I wanted for launch and it’s best you just go ahead and check out the last 2 weeks worth of changes on the updates blog.

To summarise though:

• Image previews for posts, showing you a nice image to the right of the text when one is present in the post.
• Favicons are now fetched for your feeds so everything looks nice. They’re kept up to date every few weeks.
• Your pinned feeds can now be sorted nicely using drag and drop in the browser — you can check out how that looks here. Looks cool!
• Added a reader view and can be set on a feed by feed basis (yeah, I launched that more than a few weeks ago).
• PWA (Progressive Web App) tweaks so you can reload the feed or go back to the previous screen when loading the reader view.
• Added an option to show all posts for a feed that has the "hide posts with no title" set — meaning you can view everything without trying to dance around.
• Various other style tweaks as I go!

Phew! Good fun!

In addition to this, it’s my first project where I started using Kamal Deploy. Sublime Feed runs on Rails 8 and it’s absolutely fantastic!

I’ve got to be honest, I was super nervous just getting started with Kamal... I was never one for Docker, and avoided it like there was no tomorrow. It’s healthy to keep an open mind though!

I was up until the very early morning to get this all sorted and deployed, and it was totally worth it. The thing was... to... just... start.

Of course there were some headaches, and things to learn. And that’s why I love what I do. Because when someone gives you the answer to everything, it’s no longer fun. Learning by your own means by absorbing information from around you is the best feeling in the world, even when the going goes tough.

I’m motivated to move over my other projects too, with some minor exceptions like Scribbles.

Hopefully I can keep the momentum and fully focus on Sublime Feed until the end of the year and really get it launched. Looking forward to it.

I do need to announce pricing — and I am a little conflicted on it at the moment.

Other stuff

Just a quick note that I sent out the "Sublime Ads is shutting down" emails. I’m targeting November 22nd, 2024 for a "soft" shutdown and then finally remove it from backups in the new year. I’ve mentioned this enough times now.

OK, that’s it for me this week. There are many things I want to reveal, but going to keep it close to the chest for now until I have something to show — I am excited...

And yeah, I think calling these "Update" is better suited than a "Weeklog".

Thanks for reading.

— Vincent