🤓 Dev diaries

Kept it light this evening. Just deployed a change to shoutouts.lol that allows you to get a JSON only response for a random shoutout, instead of a script. It's simple, but allows you some sort of extra customisation if you want it. Docs are here. ✌️

Zero downtime. Upgrades done. ✌️😋

There might be a little downtime to shoutouts.lol in a few minutes. Sorry for the trouble. Ruby version upgrades 😋

A first for me, but I commissioned a logo for shoutouts.lol - can't wait!

Waited until evening to finish some dark mode bits for shoutouts.lol. Happy to say it's now deployed! 😜

Work in process dark mode for shoutouts.lol.

If you're using shoutouts.lol, I'm enabling billing today at some stage. I've completed it last night and it's ready to go. There will be an email about it coming your way once it's active.

There is a 28 day trial, should take you to December. Always happy to extend.

✌️❤️

Last piece of the shoutouts.lol puzzle. Billing 😜

I had a little bit of fun with the selector... so once it's live, enjoy it.

Once subscribed, you'll have a different view:

Kept it super simple, and everything is managed by Stripe... which is super nice.

So the last few weeks I've been working on a little side project of mine. Something that I wanted to do, to learn a few things about... well... coding related things, and learn about what I could achieve in a relative short timespan.

I do love creating sites & apps, and it's nice to break away to do something different that is so very familiar.

I've been making changes to Sublime Ads over the course of the year and figured it's very specific to the "I am a developer" group. It certainly felt like an overcomplicated product for the people that just wanted something simple, and there were quite a few already. Not to mention that the pricing model was more geared towards a "professional" market...

So I ripped off Sublime Ads and created something oh so very simple called Shoutouts.

Shoutouts takes the best from Sublime Ads, but without all the hassle of having to manage categories or markup, or an API for that fact.

Shoutouts are things you want to shout out about on your website. May it be things you love, like your favourite social network, some random software developer (hi 👋), or just a tonne of affiliate links you have no idea where and when to show.

There are only 2 steps:

1. Upload your shoutouts
2. Embed the code into your site

And that's literally it.

All it takes is a simple script, and it'll do what it needs. There aren't any stats for you to look at, only the content you set and every single time it loads there is a random shoutout waiting for you.

Nothing like showing... Here is a familiar screenshot, for the list of things you want to shout about:

And then there are options to embed your shoutouts to your site. I am particular proud of coding the options here - that was fun to do... and I'm not done just yet with that either:

All in all I am happy with the way it works. I won't go into too much detail on the technical side in this post. Maybe another one.

I'm planning to make this a yearly paid service, with a "pay what is comfortable" options to choose from - so it's flexible for different wallet sizes ($5/year, $10/year etc).

It's free during the short beta as there is still a bit to do on the documentation and the billing side of things.

Anyway, I'd love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think.

Oh... you need the link? shoutouts.lol

Happy shouting ✌️❤️

P.S You can see it working on my site, in the sidebar.

Love how this looks:

Writing documentation for the next few days (in my spare time), and probably share what I've been doing at some stage next week.