Owning your Space as a Podcaster
I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Yann Ilunga on the 360 Entrepreneur Podcast. It was fun. I stressed the importance for podcasters to own the URLs of domains and RSS feeds. Also valid for bloggers.
Podrover Diaries: Cleaning a stain in the iOS navigation bar
Podrover Diaries is a series about my adventures in building Podrover, a service to track, collect and share your podcast reviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed or join my newsletter to stay up to date with upcoming adventures. When I released the 1.3.5 version of Podrover some customers reported the presence of a “stain”. Here it is (look at the top and bottom right). I didn’t notice it at first but it’s creepy, isn’t it?
Podrover Diaries: Table views with load more at the bottom
Podrover Diaries is a series about my adventures in building Podrover, a service to track, collect and share your podcast reviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed or join my newsletter to stay up to date with upcoming adventures. “Why there isn’t a built-in component to make this?” I remember this question rolling in my head as I was building this allegedly simple feature in Podrover. You have seen this pattern many times:
Taking the time
I usually build a feature, deploy it (after testing :) and rush writing the announcement. Then I move on to the next task. No games, no ceremony. This time I want to take some more time. I want to slow down. Last week I deployed a big new feature in Podrover, but didn’t announce it yet. It’s hidden, but working. I kept an eye on the performance in the last few days.
Podrover Diaries: Building Login and Signup views
Podrover Diaries is about my adventures in building Podrover, a service to track, collect and share your podcast reviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed or join my newsletter to stay up to date with upcoming adventures. I took me five days to build v1 of Podrover for iPhone. I spent two full days just for login and signup. Weird uh? My goal was to build something easy to use but also easy to build, without going crazy about different layouts for different devices.
I wrote an application in Objective-c
Podrover Diaries is about my adventures in building Podrover, a service to track, collect and share your podcast reviews. Subscribe to the RSS feed or join my newsletter to stay up to date with upcoming adventures. No, I didn’t inherit an old project. Yes, I know it’s 2017. Yes, I know there’s a thing called Swift. And yet, on January 2nd I created a new Xcode project, I picked Objective-c and I don’t regret it.
Podrover Graduation Day
It has been a rollercoaster. Sometimes I thought I was done. Sometimes I thought this day would never come. I made it. Podrover is out of beta. I am proud of what I achieved so far. There’s still a lot to do, but I am very happy with this milestone. Podrover and AppVersion are two products that I fully produced. Design, development, marketing, everything. I am very happy with my life these days.
Celebration Test #1
One of the three words I picked for 2016 Today was a kind of down day, in which I couldn’t get a lot done. I tried to work in first gear mode. I worked on the core of a new feature, then I had a walk and thought about my long todo list. Suddenly two neurons collided in my brain and I wondered: how is my done list? When I got back from the walk I sifted through the log of activities in AppVersion, and it was a bit messy.
Behind an Icon
We usually see the final product. We judge it pretty quickly. We almost never think how the designer got to that result. Here’s the story behind the icon of Podrover. I wanted to design it myself, but the entrepreneur side of me won that argument with a “let’s outsource the design of the icon while you keep on building the app”. I had a few ideas in mind, mostly playing with the concept of rover as a vehicle.
Monitoring a Server with the Telegram API
Some servers behind Podrover are just workers and do not run a web application, so I can’t use Pingdom and the like to monitor them. I could use some library like Monit but honestly I didn’t want to install one more thing on the server and I like to exploit push notifications when possible. I am already monitoring some behavior of my DB servers via Slack. When some key activity is performed a message is sent to a private Slack group, and I get a notification on my iPhone.
Lock Yourself Out
Ok a few days ago I said Lock Yourself In and now I say lock yourself out. Both are right, just not at the same time :) An external deadline keeps you accountable. But sometimes you have to step away from the keyboard to get the word out and talk to your future customers. The code that you push every day isn’t going to announce itself and your product has no value if you don’t explain it.
Lock yourself in
No setting a deadline does not work for me. I mean it works for client projects but when I am building my products it just doesn’t work. Honestly I don’t why, I should take some time off to think about it. But not now, because I have locked myself in. With Podrover I am sponsoring the Release Notes Conference. Since we announced the sponsorship the progress has been huge, especially regarding the UX and anything that is user facing.
No framework means your framework
Little update on my search for a UIKit for web apps. After experimenting for a few hours with some frameworks and kits I decided to go with no framework, that is my framework. I am following the Trello CSS guide and am really liking it. After all the UI of Podrover is pretty simple and what matters is the interaction. I am happy that ended up with: a single CSS file code that I actually understand code that I know how to tweak My personal suggestion is: don’t sweat it, especially at the beginning.
Picking a chat widget
It’s a fact that a channel like real-time chat helps conversions. So I wanted to put a little widget on the home page of Podrover. Much like the the blog generator and the CSS framework the hunt was … wandering in a jungle. I am more and more convinced that a search on Google is not enough anymore. Sure, you dig out a list of potential candidates but how do you choose?