James Kenny

I finally got around to updating the blog's theme. It's been the same for about 10 years, so it needed a new look.

Oh, and I also added a link to my Makerlog profile to the blog.

With Audience you can have multiple sites, the site switcher will also show some stats, like the number of subscribers, but I'll also be adding newsletter stats here too,

Also thinking a lot about adding a lot of colour to the UI,

It's been a meeting kinda week.

A little bit of a planning session this morning. Working out what comes next and what I need to be working on to get where I want to go.

The new base layout for Audience is starting to look good. This is the bit when I build out the menu and think it's great and in a few weeks I think ..... eh......

But the goal is to make it easy for you to do what you want. For example, I'm putting the "Connect your email provider" link right in the nav bar on top. If you have connected, it will show that you have connected.

I think this will also help with the onboarding. You don't have to click through many things to get going. In the olden days of V1, I was making users connect with their email provider before getting into the app, and I think switching it around will help. (this is why feedback is good)

My overall idea for Audience V2 is starting to take shape. I have been very deliberate in taking this slow. I've gathered a lot of feedback from users and people who send newsletters, which has been helpful.

I've also been going down a marketing rabbit hole, especially around B2B and what B2B email marketing looks like.

The 3rd part has been thinking about what I want to build. What would I find enjoyable to build and what I need from an email marketing tool. To get a bit deep, can I build audience in a way so it can market audience through email marketing. But I also have other products that need a good email marketing tool.

So that's the scope that's feeding into the V2 design.

This is an API I'm creating to capture webhook calls from different payment providers.

At the moment, I'm just storing the payloads. The next step will be to build processors to handle / report on the data.

Batched up a bunch of bugs, and spent most of the day clearing them out.

I deployed the new update for the site.

Added an about page to the site with a little bio. It's a start, it's always hard to know how much or how little to say, because after a while you start to ramble, kind of like I'm doing here.

or is it 😉

I've added a photo page that shows some information about the photo. The idea here is to add a description to explain the background or my thoughts on the photo's composition.

And I can also include the settings for the camera taking the photo.

Doing a bit of work on the layout and the colours. I've hidden the menu items for what isn't there yet.

And worked on the colour palette around the background, It's no longer black background, more of a slate gray colour. I think that looks better than just a black background. The photos look better with it.

A sneak peek at the new layout for the site.

A chat in Slack a while back is behind some of the new design changes and gave me some really good ideas for the layout.

I still have to work on the menu and those pages and lazy loading. I have a lot of photographs to load! And I want to make it as dynamic as possible

Building out the first draft of the image gallery, the site is for photography, so that should be the focus. The current site makes the photos look very small. I want to make them centre stage.

For desktops, I've set the max to 3 columns; with the aspect ratio on, I get some cool stacking from CSS 😀 On smaller screens, it goes to a single column.

Adding a nav menu, the old site didn't have one, it just showed my featured images.

For the new site, I want to split between featured and recent work, so instead of just publishing to Instagram, I want to put my new work on the site aswell. It also means I have to create an "about" page. 😒

It's that time again!

I'm going to rebuild my photography site, some changes to the layout and style I want to make, they might be easier to do with a new site. Also, cleaning up some code makes it easier to maintain.

It's a bug until it isn't, then it's a fixed bug, or crushed or something like that.

You get the idea.

Time for the server admin hat to be in action.

Finally catching up on last week and getting updates out.

It's a bug fixing kinda day.

I am going fully retro for the new login screen of Audience, who needs CSS! 😀

I got some new ideas for posts; it's been a while since I posted. I'm thinking a series on DB performance might be fun to go into some detail on.