Digester (Abandoned)

When I initially picked the color scheme for digester, I wanted to find something I personally like. I knew the brownish orange was an unconventional pick, but I wanted to create something unique.

In the meantime I both received complaints from users that the color scheme is outright ugly (or a kinder form of the same message) and I read up on color theory. Blue is a natural choice for digester, because it is the color of calmness.

Is it a coincidence that both Twitter and Facebook picked blue as well? Do they want to signal calmness with that? To me, both of them are quite the opposite: attention grabbing and interrupting!

While I do have a twitter account, I almost never checked it. At some point, I even pledged to not look at twitter for a while, because reading all that negativity made me feel miserable.

I always knew, however, that I'm also missing out. Twitter is where people share interesting stories and encourage others to be creative.

With digester's Twitter integration, I think I solved that problem for me: I can now add a subscription for a twitter user and have their tweets (only theirs, no retweets or replies) directly delivered to me e-mail inbox instead of having to visit Twitter.

It's been a while since the last update, but digester is still alive and well! The reason it took a bit longer this time is that I have started a part-time freelance job, which reduces my "digester time" to one day per week. But also, I have been working on this rather big milestone.

So what are Lists about? Digester does not help with discovering new content. So far, you'd have to enter a specific URL of a blog or the name of a Github project in order to get weekly updates with new blog posts or project releases. This is improved with Lists by being able to groupe blogs and projects in a List and then share it.

For example, let's assume I was currently interested in JavaScript. I could now go ahead and create a new List called "JavaScript Ecosystem". I could add some relevant blogs of prominent people in the world of JavaScript as well as some related Github projects. Instead of subscribing to an individual channel (blog or project), I can now create a subscription for a list and thereby get a convenient update about what is going on. By sharing this list with fellow JavaScript people, they can profit from the work I already did with collecting blogs etc. Furthermore, they'll keep getting updates from blogs I might add in the future.

The List feature is not entirely complete though -- in particular the list themselves are not easily discoverable. While it is possible to search for lists in the subscription center, it might be interesting for the users to know what lists there are (eg. sorted by popularity).

While I still need to plan the next milestone, things I have in mind are the following: Rework the landing page to include some popular lists, allow users to subscribe without creating an account (already started some work on this) and adding more channels (eg. youtube or twitter).

While the MVP was to validate the general idea and making sure the pieces fit together, the milestone friends was all about bringing digester to a state where I could tell a friend "hey, check this out". Specifically, this included Facebook login and blog subscriptions.

Supporting these new features and bringing digester to this state was tricky, because I was imagining how a user might add a blog's url. Would they directly enter a link to an RSS feed or would I have to find the feed myself? Obviously, I can't anticipate what they are going to do, so I had to implement both and then test with a ton of blogs to make sure I handle all the different formats and follow links correctly. This works now for most cases with some (hopefully-) negligible exceptions.

On the login side, integrating Facebook was more difficult than Github, which was the only one so far, because I first had to create a Facebook account. When did so, they immediately flagged my account as "under review" and to this date, I haven't heard back from them. I then created a second account using my old phone number and they accepted that.

I am now going to tell some people about digester and hope that they sign up. After that, I want to further improve the product based on the feedback and eventually post it to some wider audiences like hackernews or producthunt.

Finally, after weeks of hard work, I have completed the MVP that demonstrates fully-functional features. In particular in the past few days leading up to today, I always felt like "I'm ready expect for these two things".

Being able to officially announce my MVP also means that today I share it here on indie hackers and forward the URL to some friends.

From now on, I plan to focus on new features like: Facebook login, RSS subscriptions, possibly deliver digests to Slack, etc. I have a long list of ideas and now comes the prioritization :)

After I have quit my full time job, I started working on digester full time by defining the features for an MVP: Github releases delivered via e-mail based on the user's preference.

While I understand that new releases of software might not be the #1 thing someone wants to have as weekly updates, this makes for a good MVP, because github has a well defined API.