What's Booklet?
(In this section, I'm going to write a pitch from scratch every week. So, no cut-and-paste. It's good practice for me!)
Booklet is a better Google Groups. It's a calm place for discussion and collaboration among groups of people. I'm building it because real-time chat apps are hard to keep up with, especially in big groups, and they discourage long-form conversation. I like email, but Google Groups and mailing lists are better for announcing things than for discussion, and they send too many emails.
The core parts of Booklet are a forum and a member directory for each group. It will also have a good daily/weekly email summarizing what's happening in your community. I plan to charge a one-time fee of $29 to set up a new group. I'm tired of subscriptions and want these groups to stay active long-term.
What have I accomplished this week?
This week I added the ability to log out, and I added the ability to log in. It's not that exciting but is important. I also set up the production server - so the code (so far) is published at bookl.et. You can't do much - sign up and sign in - but you can try it out!
The other thing I'm working on is the ability to add and verify an email address. The database and email provider are both set up already - so the app can store addresses and send emails. Now, I'm building the pages that let people type in an email address then verify it.
The email sending on Booklet is slightly different from most applications because I want to let one person add multiple email addresses to one account on Booklet. Recently, a coworker invited me to a GroupMe group this week through my work email. The problem was that my phone number was already associated with my personal email address in GroupMe. Unfortunately, GroupMe believes that each phone number can only have one email address - so it just wouldn't let me accept the invitation to join the group. Ugh!
I want to make it easy to associate different communities with different email addresses in Booklet. So, you can use a student email for a student group and a professional email for work. But, one phone number unifies all of these email addresses. Setting up multiple email addresses per person on the server takes more work than the GroupMe-style approach, but hopefully, it benefits people who use Booklet.
What's next?
I'm finishing the ability to add an email address on Booklet. Then, I move onto the exciting part - creating a group!
How you can help ⬇️
It doesn't do much - but try joining bookl.et, signing out, and signing in again. Let me know how I can improve it and if it looks weird on your particular device.