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This happened in July on the maker train

In July, I didn't launch a standalone product. Instead, I was trying to enhance the ones I shipped previously.

I spent the most time on Story View, it’s still my most successful product with more than $250 revenue till today. As I’m rolling out updates to the plugin frequently, at the beginning of July I changed the way I do that. More about that in this milestone.

These are the features I added to Story View in July:

  • Custom colors for texts and text backgrounds
  • Display/Hide story controllers (previous/next buttons)
  • Default AMP settings
  • Default settings
  • Support multiple Story View buttons on the same page

Most of these were in my backlog when I launched the product, but luckily, some of them were requested by customers as well, so I hope this means that the plugin evolves in the right direction.

I’ve also updated the landing page of the plugin because most of the new features weren’t visible there. I still have to work a lot on talking about the capabilities of the plugin, so I’ll create short videos about different sections of it.

My first open source project

Besides winning the category of desktop apps in Makers Festival, Maker Goals Menubar became my very first open-source project. In July, I spent a few days refactoring the code before making it available to everyone, as this was my first desktop, react, electron, etc application. The hardest part was to create the readme file with all the necessary information 😅 I just realized how hard it is to add the right amount of information to it in a format everyone will understand. I haven’t received any complaints about it yet, but I think that’s because no one took a close look at it 😄 So kudos to all open source developers who create a nice readme and documentation for their projects.

HashtagCalendar is still doing great with an average of 5-10 visitors a day, so I spent some time trying to get some press coverage for it. Well, without any luck. At least, I got some responses this time. Just the thought that someone read my message and spent some time to send me a response makes it easier to get over the rejection.

I’ve spent some time to enhance a few features of TWiS and CreativeDEVjobs as well, but nothing significant happened with those products.

I’ve learned the basics of Shopify extension development as well (I followed this tutorial) because I have a product idea that I think could work on that platform pretty well. If everything goes as planned, I’ll start to work on it at the end of August, at the beginning of September.

At the moment, I’m working on my Fixathon project, and I’m using my newly learned Node.js skills for that.

I have a few more things to add to Story View this month as well so August is gonna be pretty busy.