Now that I’ve noticed more people using the site, one major issue is that it’s hard to query for things you might be interested in. Before there wasn’t even a filter everything was in chronological view. As someone developing it by myself I didn’t have time to do fancier fixes so for now I implemented filters, popular/recent, with image.
If there aren’t enough posts popular defaults to showing pictures with images / longest text first.
The goal is posts with more context get more engagement because they put more effort, while still allowing users to use it for their chiller archiving purposes. Once I hit 100 users, I think I’ll add following.
After implementing feed grouping, in my initial attempt I noticed it would no longer be truly chronological anymore which meant even though things were nicely grouped, new posts would actually get pushed to the bottom.
For someone who happened to be checking casually, I wanted to make sure they always saw new posts. I decided to only have grouping if two compact posts were side by side, but allowing for more lax grouping standards (one in between) if it occurred after the first three posts (arbitrary-ish number, to be updated).
With the second week now seeing how people engaged more than I thought, I then implemented notifications for individual posts. I also launched on Twitter and started getting a lot of people I didn’t know which introduced new problems that I had to fix such as people posting in different time zones. I also didn’t realize people thought a week was monday to sunday which I also need to fix.
I also been manually sending emails because I don’t have time to set up a cron job and when I do I want people to set their settings. Below is the sequence I’m roughly thinking
Before I thought IPW would be also a way for people to express abstractly but I think now I want to focus more on allowing people to casually check more efficiently and let the work speak for someone more than the profile.
Over winterbreak I created the MVP of my weekly posting app, it’s been something I had been trying to work on since last year. It existed under this idea that what people made expressed more about them than what social media currently incentivizes.
Since I’m one person shipping this, I prioritized the following features before inviting select friends to test it: