Packing all of my things, driving across the midwest, moving into a new city, and some work led to an unintentional “Summer holiday” from Booklet. It’s been about a month since my last update! But, now I’m settled and ready to jump back in.
What's Booklet?
Booklet is software for small communities. Many people use Slack or Discord today for participating in groups. But, synchronous tools like chat make it hard to keep up with conversations, and they lead to an unnecessary sense of FOMO from too many notifications. I’m making Booklet a calmer, simpler way to stay in contact. It does this with a forum, a member directory, and a single daily email update.
What have I accomplished this week?
During my break, I learned some new tools and implemented them:
I configured the site to be able to run asynchronous jobs. Specifically, I installed Redis for Ruby on Rails, and configured this new database on the server. This unlocks the ability to handle batched background jobs - such as sending a daily email. It also enables some real-time collaboration tools (i.e., websockets) that will come in handy in the future.
I set up error monitoring using Honeybadger. Now, if I deploy broken code to the server - I will get notified with plenty of details.
In the admin panel, I added a way to see which emails were sent to which user. This is minor, but has come in handy in the past for debugging and customer support.
I enabled some tooling to make the Booklet app work without page reloads. This is a refinement that makes the app feel more modern, and it enables some more advanced interactions in the future - such as real-time comments or embedded forms. Most apps nowadays use React to build a single-page application like this. But, I am using the new Hotwire framework from the Ruby on Rails project - which is a simpler way to accomplish similar results. The results won’t be very noticeable immediately, but this approach enables me to buid the type of real-time product that I seek.
What's next?
Enough with the refinements and infrastucture! I’ve gotten the Booklet code to a place where it has all of the tools and libraries I want to make building and running the code easier. Everything I need - from sending emails to advanced forms to background jobs - is ready.
Now, it’s time to let people create new communities. So, here’s what I hope to accomplish next:
Pick the name for the community, like “my book club”
Choose the location for the community - almost like a username. For example, `bookl.et/mybookclub`
Invite other members
How you can help ⬇️
Let me know your feedback, thoughts, and strong opinions!
Thanks 🙏