WebCull

Excited to finally share an update on WebCull’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature, which officially launched on June 14th! I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but better late than never.

With privacy at the core of everything we do, this launch is a major milestone for WebCull. E2EE ensures that your bookmarks are fully encrypted from your device to our servers, meaning no one—not even WebCull—can access your data. The only person who holds the decryption keys is you. This kind of protection is critical as privacy concerns grow, and we wanted to make sure our users have a tool that truly keeps their data private.

It took a lot of testing and tweaking to get here, but I’m proud of what we’ve built. We’ve integrated E2EE into both our web platform and browser extensions, so no matter where you access your bookmarks, you can trust that your data is secure.

If you’re already using WebCull, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the E2EE feature. And if you’re not, now is the perfect time to join! Feel free to drop any questions or feedback.

Six months ago, we decided to turn our bookmark manager into a browser extension. This idea came from wanting to provide all the features of our bookmark manager within an extension popup as well as simplify our code for a upcoming feature release (E2EE). Instead of keeping two separate versions—one as a web app and another as an extension—we combined them. We used webpack and shell scripting, to make this possible. Now, we can update and fix bugs much easier because everything comes from the same source.

We learned a lot from this. One of the biggest lessons was to avoid having two sets of code that do pretty much the same thing no matter what. It makes everything more complicated than it needs to be and the product is now better for it.

Another good thing about this change is that whenever we update something big in the bookmark manager, the extension gets updated too. For example, we're adding end-to-end encryption to the extension. Before, this kind of update would have been a big headache because we'd have to change and test everything twice. Now, it's much smoother because we only have one version to worry about.

This move to a single extension has made our lives easier and taught us the value of keeping things simple.

Our goal during this migration was to have zero down time and we pretty much achieved it. There may be been a few errors that users experienced but they would have been mitigated by simply refreshing the app. There was a lot of planning that went into it and it was worth it to be able to see that no one contacted us about any disruptions to the service. Disruptions are something we simply never want to have, its like a core value to us, so it feels great to see that we can do such a heavy migration without an issue. Aww yess!

Tomorrow January 6th at 10:00pm EST we are releasing one of biggest upgrades yet. If all goes well, it should be like nothing happened, besides some security updates, some URL changes, and hopefully some improved loading speed. Yet this is one of the biggest features we've ever worked on.

You guessed it, or you read the title of this post. It's a node migration, meaning we took our mostly vanilla codebase and rewrote to be node based. Why?

• clear code
• portability to desktop apps and native mobile using electron
• faster (removed all monolithic code making it work great on a CDN)
• serves locally for easier development
• deploys better reducing chance of bugs in production

It's a pretty significant change code wise and we are hoping everything goes smoothly but there's a small chance of the site and app experiencing some bugs and potentially short down time. We have been planning this for weeks and are doing everything we can to make the experience as seamless as possible.

This is a very special moment in time for us, a testament to our belief in our software. If we didn't fully believe in the future of our bookmark manager, we would never have invested so much into getting a browser extension launched in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, and Opera because this was no easy task. It's been a little while since our last launch of something new, not because we haven't been doing things, but simply because we are working on several things in tandem and it was difficult to get this extension out and bug-free. But we are very grateful we did it because first off our team, friends, and family are using it and loving it, and second, executing and finishing things we have been asked for dozens of times by our users is a very rewarding experience. Our only real goal is to make software people use and enjoy and this launch helps make this more of a reality than ever before.

If you've been to our homepage you'll see we have a list of goals that we are checking off and they are not small. They are things that make a big difference in the bookmark manager software world, things that we believe only make complete sense to have. And we are checking off that list one item at a time and are closer than ever at executing on everything. This is very important to us because not only are we demonstrating diligence but also realizing our goal for the software and its vision.

The extension, like our web-app, is ultimately simple by design and different from what's out there. When we say simple we don't mean easy to make, we mean simple for the end-user to use on a daily basis. The type of simple where things work as you expect and don't take any explanation. For example, the location picker, the input area that you choose the stack where your link should be stored, works exactly like a textbox for those who prefer to use their keyboard but also works great point-and-click style using the drop-down menus. It's your choice, there's no extra click to enable one mode or the other, it just works. Yes... it just works, the apple slogan we've heard a million times, we don't believe it belongs to just Apple, it's a core philosophy in user interface design that we have taken very close to heart.

WebCull is on a mission to make default browser bookmark managers completely obsolete and hitting goals like this makes this more of a reality than ever. There's nothing like the feeling of setting yourself out on a very large task and never giving up until it's completed. We live for these moments and love to share them with the world. Thanks for being part of this with us.

To learn more about our extension check it out here: https://webcull.com/reading/bookmark-manager-extensions

And here for a video demonstration:
https://youtu.be/d0FHYINoepw

Today marks the day that we reached 500 users after launching only about 2 1/2 months ago. After personally being involved in a lot of unsuccessful startups in the past, it's really nice to have a product that has a steady stream of growth.

We haven't spent anything of significance on marketing, everything has been organic. We are so grateful to the communities (big and small) that have helped us so far. If it weren't for you, we would only have a small fraction of the users we have today.

Thank you! We are truly honored.

We believe software isn't all about functionality and utility. Aesthetics can play a surprisingly large role in what makes us want to use something. It also can play a role in our mood and thought process. This is why we found it to be one of our top priorities to integrate Unsplash into our app once all our core features were built.

In case you're unfamiliar with them, Unsplash is one of the largest royalty-free stock photography websites on the web. They require photographers who wish to share their images with the world to upload only super high-quality images with no watermarks. They have so many photographers that their database is huge, filled with stunning images that you are free to use as you please.

Unsplash actually also has a really cool API that is easy to integrate with. It provides the ability to search their entire database for images without restrictions besides a very large daily search cap that we are nowhere near close to. The actual integration part took us about a week to do, most of the time being spent creating the UI on our end.

After the integration was complete we took another week or so adding in some extra features to alter the look of our UI with a feature called mix-blend-mode which lets you change how the colors of our UI and the background images mix. We were very happy with the end result, leaving lots of room for creativity.

We are proud to have taken the aesthetics of our software seriously by providing plenty of ability to customize the look. This may not directly translate to profit for us but at the end of the day our software has become a lot better looking.

BetaList is (if you're not already familiar with them) one of the biggest start up aggregates out there. They curate a daily list of high quality startups that are just launching. A lot of people follow BetaList so it meant a significant amount of publicity for us.

This was the first big traffic bump we got since the launch and helped grow our web-app by an extra couple hundred users within a few days. On the second day after being posted, we started trending and we were the first startup mentioned on the page for another day.

This exposure led us to getting reposted on several other mediums that also trended such as SteemHunt and a few others. Subsequently we got a lot of tweets (>40) mentioning WebCull's services as well as a couple blog posts.

We're very grateful for this validation and feedback from the public. It gives us motivation to continue building more great things for this product knowing that people appreciate it and see its value.

It took around 3 weeks to finish the first prototype of WebCull, at first only releasing it to family and friends. One more week was spent fine tuning everything before it was ready to be shared with the public.

September the 21st will be a day that will never be forgotten in this companies history. I stayed up all night the day before, crunching my to-do list until it was around 3:30 am. I thought about going to bed but I knew I needed to finally share what we had been working on all this time.

So I spent the next couple hours working on the video demonstration for a reddit.com/r/webdev showoff Saturday post. I didn't have time to put music or anything fancy on the video, I just made a simple screen-capture with zero editing. I posted the video and hoped for the best.

To my surprise I refreshed the page a couple minutes later and seen that there were already 7 upvotes. I was blown away by that and hoping it wasn't just a fluke so I refreshed the page another few minutes later and seen the upvotes had already doubled and the comments were already starting.

I replied to a few comments but I had just stayed up all night to do this post so I had to put it away and stop to go to sleep (not an easy thing to do). By the next day the comments were flooding in and in the end the post had gotten over 700 upvotes and a lot of comments. That day we got over 100 new users, which is not bad for the first day being launched to the public with not much of a game plan.

The comments that we received were very flattering but also contained highly constructive criticism. Right away we started working on the issues brought up to perfect the user experience and the way we represent what the product is to people. The feedback provided by this stage was invaluable and crucial for our continued growth.

Thank you reddit!

Link to the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/d7877c/showoff_saturday_i_made_a_web_tool_to_help/

I have something like 2 thousand bookmarks, I'm not a hoarder I just work hard and have a lot of online resources for the things I do. Ever since I started using a computer I've been dependent on the default functionality of the browser's bookmark manager. Now the problem is I have actually found myself become discouraged to save a bookmark for a number of reasons.

For one over the years I have lost thousands of valuable bookmarks. This is largely because no cloud service existed for bookmarks and if I had a failed hard-drive I'd loose everything. So when browsers started offering cloud-based bookmark saving I jumped on that right away.

To my dismay I quickly found out that the cloud solution on both Firefox and chrome suffer from major issues like things not going into the right order or bookmarks being not where I left them and this discouraged me to the point that I just turned the services off. I'd rather have no cloud solution than never know if the bookmark I saved actually is saved and saved in the right location.

So one day I'm sitting here at my desk with a highly valuable resource that I just found on reddit and I'm thinking to myself "do I even bother save this link right now". I won't have access to it from anywhere except this computer, it will be lost in a tool that I really don't care for anymore. And that's when it hit me, I should love my bookmark manager, there really needs to be something better. Something that's inspired by the current century.