November feels like yesterday, oh wait, it was — it’s been feeling a little too quick though. Which I guess is a good thing. A lot of things have happened.
The most important one is that I finally upgraded my computer, nothing fancy, something so I can keep working — my laptop hasn’t been doing well at all. I got a bog standard Mac mini for the same price than what it would cost to replace the keyboard on the laptop. Good deal. It works great!
I was growing a little bit depressed about the situation and things didn’t align too well with the budgeting because of a turbulent year and then some — although I hope I have a bit of a buffer these days. Just need the world to get a little better now, which I think we’re heading towards (although slowly).
Saying that, I’ve been a little slow on the project and client front as my laptop was dying a slow death working in clamshell mode (I noticed that the battery swell up too when I unplugged it — good riddance). Every day felt like a chore and where the tools just get in your way. However, I am happy it lasted so long! I reckon it might have lasted a little longer if the keyboard kept functioning.
Anyway, this my first upgrade to an Apple M powered machine, and it’s great! I now know that I don’t need anything fancy and comfortably can get my stuff done. Heck, I even played some X-Plane on it, and I am blown away. I don’t really game that much anymore, but it’s nice that I can just plug in my joystick and shoot a circuit or do a little instrument flying (it’s super relaxing for me and lets me measure the state of mind I am in — because if I can do a difficult IFR approach and landing I will need 110% focus — games are great like that).
In terms of my workflow, it just rocks! Everything just hums along — no issue with Ruby on Rails dev, nor React Native. RN projects always feel heavy because I have to run the simulators, but no more — I can run multiple sims (Android & iOS) at the same time, no performance penalty. Building iOS and Android apps take a minute (even one my largest ones that took 10 - 15 minutes on a good day) — and I can build them both at the same time no issue.
Yikes, OK, wow, too much personal stuff here already that I wanted to avoid.
Should we talk about projects? Let’s go!
I’ve been pushing myself to launch Sublime Feed over the past few weeks. It felt a little stuck over summer, so I wanted to put in the extra effort to just get it out there even if I think it’s not 100% ready yet. Better to start somewhere and go from there.
It’s built for my own personal need, and you know, I had a lot of really great comments from a few folks that really love it a lot. That made get to the finish line and just get it out there.
You know who you are, so a heartfelt thank you to you! ✌️❤️
For most of the month I concentrated on a few little things and bug fixes, mainly around feeds that redirect. On top of that I added support to export your feeds to OPML — so you can take it with you if it turns out it’s not for you.
A lot of work has been done, which I covered before, regarding grabbing images and favicons for websites — I believe it works pretty well and am not complaining. There are a few bottlenecks that I want to fix though.
In addition to that, I launched the paid plan — it’s $3/month or $30/year. I think that’s a good balance for what it is. There is also a lifetime plan for $149/once — if you sign up before the end of December (2024) you may find it at a much lower price (hint hint).
You can start for free with 10 feeds, and then upgrade to unlock unlimited ones. I think I’ll put some features behind the paid plan, like pinned feeds and more things I want to do (but let’s see).
I suggest you give it a try and hopefully you’ll regain some of that calmness that should come with staying up to date, without having to tick boxes or chasing that unread counter — no thanks.
You can sign up here.
And yes, I need to work on the homepage somewhat — it’s terrible 😋
Who ever said that a blogging platform would be easy to manage? No one I guess. Scribbles is humming along nicely. It made a good amount of income earlier this year, and I am so grateful for it. Things have been somewhat slow on the monthly income front though, however I think that’s OK — I am not here to win any prices.
For a time I was thinking of removing sign up and just concentrate on the people that have an account already and that have paid. However, I get a steady amount of sign ups and a few subscriptions that are worth it for me — I am not here for the short term, this is all a long term thing for me... hence I offered a lifetime plan initially.
Which brings me to the first point! The Lifetime plan is back. It’s a pay what you want, with a minimum of $199 (normally $229). I think that’s a great deal for what you get. If you do decide to sign up and want to use any of my other services, always happy to apply a small discount (that actually goes for all my products, so just ask).
In addition to that, I made a promise, although the timelines are still to be determined, that there will be a self hosted version at some stage next year for any lifetime purchase. That means you can run it yourself, and do what you like with it, without selling it of course 😘 I wrote a whole thing about it on the updates blog, so feel free to read it (and come back please).
And there is more!
Probably forgot something here.
As always, I am keeping options open what to work on next, although I have a good idea what that will be.
Any folks have asked for better theming support, and it’s been brewing in my background brain process for some time, and I know what I need to do... but it won’t be this year as it’s going to be a bigger task.
This project grew on me the most, and surprisingly it has stuck with a lot of people also — am very grateful for it!
I have been putting the project on the side a little so I can concentrate on both Scribbles and Sublime Feed. That’s on me!
I’ve scribbled down a few improvements I’d like to make to it, and I know how that will look like.
The biggest battle over the past few months were the email reports that randomly got stuck. A few weeks ago I tackled that issue by upgrading the underlying job processing to use Solid Queue backed by the SQLite. I am happy to report that it just works, which is great! Still a little reluctant to drop my guard though.
Another little bit I was working on is to email everyone that was using more than the free tier allows (1,000 hits a month), averaged over 3 months usage. Tinylytics won’t stop collecting hits if you go above the limit — I never implemented anything for that. However it’s slowly time for me to do that where the dashboard disables (but allowing for an export).
A few folks have upgraded (thank you!), some have just deleted their account (that’s fine also), and some haven’t done anything about it... I guess that’s fine too. I’ll be working on features that slowly turn off things, like email reports, dashboard access (Except if you wanted to export it) — or perhaps I just stop showing data after a certain date (I think that’s what I’ll do).
It’s also come time to rework the uptime monitoring — it’s still the same as it was when I first implemented it. However that would require another project of mine to get its feet wet first... and I am ready to make that happen. There are limitation to what I use now, and I just need to rip that all out and start from zero.
Yikes, getting long, so here are some few more bits I shipped:
- Added an option to disable hit collection on pages that return error messages (like a 404 page). This does an extra call to the current page and checks the status code that is returned.
- Tweaked the layout of settings a little, because it feels a mess, and I’ll do more here.
- In addition to that, I made the charts look a little cleaner with the dates.
There is a long list of things I’d like to do, just like my other projects... and I am ready to dive in. 2025 will be the year for Tinylytics and I hope you will like what I have in store.
Other stuff
I wrote a lot already, so I’ll keep it short.
Thank you to all that follow along, that like my work, and for all of you that subscribe and to those that bring me up by your emails and messages of support. Without you I could not do what I do.
My projects are suited for a niche set of users and I have no interest in catering for larger faceless businesses — it’s my mission to always keep everything deeply personal. It gives me no greater joy than to help others and if I ever felt that I was too disconnected between “product” and my users then I wouldn’t feel that this is my purpose in life.
Thanks for taking the time to read this far. See you next time.
— Vincent
