December 16, 2024

The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries #187

Misattributed newsletter replies, Mr. StoryGraph's return to TikTok, and a progress update one week out from my self-imposed deadline! 😅

What’s Worse Than No Replies…?

Not knowing who the reply came from! That’s what! 😩

After I sent out #186, I realised some moments later that I hadn’t received a copy in my inbox.

I checked in with my mum, who’s currently staying with me. Nothing.

I pinged Abbie. Nada.

Now my emails won’t send??

Hours later and still nothing. I send a support ticket to Buttondown who originally tell me that all my emails have indeed gone out, but when I remark on the discrepancy of about 150 between the number of emails that they’ve told me have gone out — which I wasn’t able to see in my dashboard (and still can’t as of right now) — and my subscriber base, they realise something is indeed broken.

Next morning, I wake up to find #186 in my inbox, some replies from people telling me they received the issue twice, and a reply that clearly came from my dad, and yet Buttondown is telling me that it came from my friend Valerie… 😫

So now I start to look through the other replies and see that where there is a sign-off in the email, it often doesn’t match the name contained in the email address. And some people — including my friend Valerie — seemed very keen, “replying” to me multiple times, with a different personality and way of writing each time…

…

Yup, that’s right. Now, my replies were being misattributed. What a disaster! 😭

What followed was two weeks of me chasing support to find out what was going on, not being able to reply to people, and me stressing about whether today’s email would go out okay. (The jury’s still out on that one. 🤷🏾‍♀️)

While Mailchimp has its flaws, for five and a half years I never once had issues with my newsletters not being sent out or having the replies be mislabelled.

I’ve only just moved to Buttondown and I’ve had such a terrible experience these last couple weeks, both with the bug itself and with support. It bothers me (Only mildly. I’m fine. Honest!) that I’ve never missed a Monday since this newsletter started (though I switched from weekly to fortnightly a few years back) and now a bunch of people received it a day late in their inbox (though I know the main thing is that I wrote it on time 😌)!

Soo, all that being said, does anybody know any great alternatives to Buttondown? Ideally one where I can port my new subscribers over. 🥹

Mr. StoryGraph returns to TikTok! 🕺🏿

And he’s got a couple of messages for everyone.

First, on how we’ve been failing you every year and what we plan to do about it this time:

And then Rob explains StoryGraph’s use of AI: how he came up with the idea for the Personalized Preview, why AI was a good fit for the solution, how we handle user data, the pain points with the feature, and more!

Since Last Time…

Here’s a status update on my current three focal points:

• Performance
  
  The denormalised table for books is live and is being used to populate some of our list views. Next step is to port it over to all list views and use it to power filter queries around the app.

• Implementing the new designs
  
  I’ve hardly touched the implementation of Yeji’s designs since last time. I need to massively up my work on this. I’m still feeling confident about getting it all done as, per my brief, a lot of it is “polish” and “sprucing up”, not a “complete revamp”.
  

  

• Improving the UX of the mobile apps
  
  This is where most of my efforts have gone in the last couple of weeks, as while I can be working on other things up until the very last minute, I need to push out new versions of the apps for review in good time.
  
  I was going to introduce the use of native modals in order to improve the user experience in a bunch of places, and I got quite far, but ended up stuck on a few bugs. I had a consulting call with an expert on the mobile app platform I’m using and he suggested that a new library he’s written handles all of the bugs and edge cases I’m currently dealing with.
  
  I realised that, strategically, it’d be better if I spent more time on performance work and the redesign, and moving the apps over to use native tab navigation (so that each tab is actually a tab, and your position is retained), rather than trying to rush something that’ll still likely have flaws. So that’s what I’m doing. New app releases with tabs hopefully dropping real soon. 👀

  

New versions of the mobile app were already deployed last week though, and now links open up in the apps! ✨

Also, the plan is to fix the barcode scanner before Christmas…which will end up being the one-year anniversary of its launch!

Oh, and most of the work on the Paused feature is done! The only main bit left is the calculation on how long it took you to read a book, making sure pauses are properly incorporated.

I’ve also started work on push notifications…

And volunteer librarians, I haven’t forgotten about you! 😉

One week to go!! 🙃

#trystorygraphforjan?

I’ve been seeing a bunch of people say they’re going to try StoryGraph now to decide if they want to use it for Jan…

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you can only imagine how painful this is for me to read! 😩

So, I’ve been replying with stuff like this:

It got me thinking about how we could perhaps run a mini campaign around the message of: Give StoryGraph a chance for the whole of Jan — we’ve got a lot of great feature releases and initiatives happening before and during the month — and if you don’t like it after that, then delete your account and data in three easy clicks.

Obviously I don’t have a lot of bandwidth, so I’m looking for small actions that have maximum impact and that others can take on for all of those sweet viral network effects.

Do we start telling everyone to use a hashtag? Is #trystorygraphforjan good? Do we make a mini graphic? What should be on it?

We already have the January Pages Challenge (yes, that’s the 2024 link for now. When 2025 goes live, that’ll automatically take you there), which should keep people in the habit of using StoryGraph all month…

If you have any ideas, please hit “Reply” and let me know! (I hope your emails come through and I’m able to reply to you no problem. 😬)

What I'm reading

I’m almost done with Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda. It was a recommendation by one of the staff members at the Call & Response bookstore in Chicago when I asked them for a recent fave that’s generally under the radar.

And, I’ve queued up Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan next. I’ve heard great things and it looks like something I can read in one sitting. Need to get those pages in! 😅 (Don’t message me telling me what it’s about, please! I know nothing!)

Have a great week,

Nadia