The past few days have been stressful. I had a self-imposed deadline to launch NICKEL on December 15th but of course things came up (wrangling subscriptions with Stripe, waiting for maintenance to finish on my servers, &c). Many pages are still half-finished and helpful UX flourishes (like knowing when your avatar has been successfully uploaded) aren't implemented yet. So why launch? Because, now I have no choice but to hurry up and make NICKEL incredible. I need some sort of external pressure if I'm ever going to get anything done. Otherwise, it'll remain a side project and this is too cool to remain such.

People who were already signed up for the mailing list have accounts made for them on a secret Creator plan that comes with 5 GB storage for free, forever. If you want to kick the tires and/or help feature development (by telling me what sucks and what works), this mailing list is the way to go.

So what's next?

• quicker update cadence (having incomplete things in the wild causes me psychic damage)
• /explore page part 1
  • in a few days, loading that page will return a random public video from the API
• those UX flourishes I mentioned earlier
• video page updates
  • currently there's a static list under the info section...these should be real videos
  • the comment box is just for looks at the moment, just terrible
• /explore page part 2
  • I'm super excited for this and it's never been done. I didn't want to just have an infinite scroll list of videos...we can do better.
• wrangling with Stripe's API to add tipping/cash out functionality

Hope you’ve had a good week and enjoyed delicious food. The private beta for NICKEL is almost upon us and I’ve still got a lot to do. However, whether I get through with my task list or not, the beta’s happening (which means I’m going to focus on the onboarding process). Anyhoo, here’s what I’ve been up to since the last dispatch.

screen recording of user-created themes, click through to see it in action, or download the attachment on this email

Remember MySpace? I’m a millennial so I have a penchant for wishing and hoping for the way social media used to be. In those days, you were only as cool as how custom you could make your profile page. People would gatekeep their favorite theme creators, which would encourage others to figure out how to view source and even learn to code. What a time.

One of the things I tend to do when working on something for quite some time is to not talk about it until I’m pretty much done before sharing. This is me attempting to buck that trend.

TL;DR: I’m building a subscription-based, short-form video platform. Think Patreon + TikTok with a cap on video length.

Terminology

• Sparks: 5 second videos
• Flames: 5 minute videos