Sublime Ads

Added a dedicated help section to Sublime Ads. Now floats at the bottom right. Clears up the header a little too. Happy with it.

Added a dedicated status page for Sublime Ads. I did have monitoring with updown.io, and still have… but decided to go with Oh Dear for this one — good opportunity to try something new. Might just try and integrate that into my Status app.

An "update" screen anyone? Thought it would be cool. Was a bit of a pain today, as my brain is certainly not functioning today — but I got there at the end.

Sublime Ads

Soooo… extended response time has been solved. It was my router/pi.hole 🤬 What a massive waste of time.

Have been seeing some unexplained latency to requests going to Sublime Ads. Last week I had an average response time of around 200 - 300ms… but over the weekend it went up to 1.7 seconds. Investigating. Hopefully it’s just the server disk or something.

Spent the evening working on a dark mode theme for Sublime Ads. Going great! Just need to work on the Settings screen and it’s ready.

(demo content shown)

The new Sublime Ads homepage is now live ✌️ It says coming soon 😋 I’m really holding myself back not to enable registration before February 1st, 2021. Still a few things to sort. Removed the "pre-register" also, sticky notes to remind yourself are better IMHO.

Thanks so very much to Ian (Micro.blog: @TheDimPause, Web: thedimpau.se) for using Sublime Ads on his site. Another use case that I didn’t even think about, book recommendations! Love it ❤️

So, this is basically how I design everything and anything to do with web or apps:

This particular example was for the new homepage (preview is here) for Sublime Ads. Most of it is in my brain. Works for me.

Today I recorded a short demo video for Sublime Ads… I was nervous, but you can find it at the bottom of the new and upcoming homepage. Guess I need to do more, and get better at it. Feedback welcome… 😬 I will stick with this one until I have launched.

I love the process of tweaking things when I’m close to shipping something (websites, apps etc). Had a great Sublime Ads session today. Hopefully it’s ready soon ❤️✌️Now it’s time for bed.

If anyone has any interest, I’m currently working on the new homepage for Sublime Ads. I’ve enabled it and you can have a peek. Wording will probably be changed as I go. Also need some screenshots and of course a pricing section. Happy what I have achieved so far.

Making some progress on the new homepage for Sublime Ads… and yeah, will probably work on the wording as I go (as usual).

Added the wording of "per month" to the pricing section of my latest Sublime Ads update post, concerning the free tiers. Might be confusing otherwise.

It's been a while since I wrote a longer post regarding Sublime Ads. So where to begin?

It's nearly there

Whilst I think progress was slow it has been going steady. As usual I am balancing more client work than my own work... but that's just the way it is. Pays the bills.

Over the past few days I worked every evening to make progress with it.

I'm happy to say, bar a real homepage and some more documentation, it is pretty much ready to launch.

Changes, changes and... tweaks

There are always a million things that you find as you go. Some you just don't know about until you're months in and you find edge cases. So I fixed those that I could find by chance!

Leading up the launch there were a few things I wanted to tackle like a Micro.blog account - so if you come from there and want to use it, I have a special free "Basic+" (basic plus) account with generous usage. Everyone seems to use the "+" sign these days... might as well join in.

That meant I had to add a few extra checks and mess with the subscription model a little. Worry not, it's all worked out!

Of course, there were wording changes everywhere... it's never going to be finished!

One of the bigger viewable changes made was to re-work the settings page with better navigation. Also made it slightly wider. Looks like this (API Key is a test one, before you want to try it):

And yeah, they jump around as you hover over them... I couldn't resist... and if your don't like it... I added an option some weeks ago to disable the playful UI.

Pricing

Sublime Ads will launch as a paid service. However, I will also allow a free "basic" tier that allows API and embed usage of 1000 hits. That means you can load up your embeds or anything straight from the API 1,000 times in a given month.

If you come from Micro.blog, you will have a Basic+ account. That has 3,000 usage points per month. To put that into perspective, my own site is way below that limit - so it's a great limit I reckon. If you come from Micro.blog, just let me know as and when you sign up and I will mark your account accordingly.

Everyone that signs up, once it's open for registration, will have a free trial of the monthly plan for 14 days. That means no limits to what you can do. Perfect for you to get started and get adding to your very own app, site or whatever (digital billboard?).

After that time, you can either subscribe for a small monthly (currently at $7/month) or you will automatically be downgraded to the Basic plan.

7 is a nice number, so I will leave it there for now. As time goes and accounts grow, I'll be increasing the price. Worry not, you will always be on the same monthly that you signed up with... unless you cancel or let your subscription lapse.

I'm not interested in complicated pricing points. Between you and me, I did try and work something out, but at the end of the day I just want to keep it super simple. So here we are - and that's why we have a free "basic" tier.

Homepage

The homepage, or the marketing page as some like to call it, is my next step. That's the biggest thing I need to worry about now. Tax was my first worry, but I dug in and just did it.

I really would love to do a live build of the homepage or something - I'm thinking of starting a Discord for that purpose. Would that be of interest? Might be utterly boring. Only problem would be my creativity - might be non-existent at any specific time.

It's all sketched out on a piece of paper... ready to go and implement.

Documentation

That's still ongoing. I'm happy where it is already, but I need to do more here.

Also thinking about onboarding videos at some stage. Although right now, as I write this, I'd love to do some live onboarding sessions with anyone that would like it.

General feeling

I've been using the platform since around April last year and I'm happy with the way it shaped up. There are already a few accounts, with my dear testers, that are also using it.

Whilst I haven't heard back from some, I believe Sublime Ads is performing well. Since I had it up and running, I had zero downtime. Let's keep it that way haha.

There are more things I want to add... as always... however I am super happy with where it is now. It's minimal, it's quick and it works.

Environment

Yeah, this was important to me... so last year I started looking at alternative server providers that provide 100% renewable hosting. I ditched Linode (sorry) and went with a German hosting provider, based in Germany (yay for data protection!). Hetzner (referral link) provides amazing servers for a great price which will allow me to grow as we go... on top all their servers run on 100% renewable! NICE.

Next steps

As I mentioned above, it's the homepage that is left to do and then it's ready to go. I won't be doing any launch press release or anything, just a normal blog post and go from there. I haven't really figured out how to go about spreading the word... but blogging is good for me. Might just do a special episode for my podcast too.

So, launch day? No idea yet... client work, other stuff... life... etc.

Thanks for reading ❤️