The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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You Complete Me
When Good Enough was in its infancy as a truly American LLC (formed in Delaware and representing one or two people who were only semi-serious about a business), it was fun to play around with building websites. Shawn and I were truly just playing and exploring, more than anything reminding ourselves that building software could be a satisfying activity. After a year of goofing around we were still enjoying it, but we were also running up against our limitations. Some things we were okay at, but many of our skills just weren’t that impressive.
So began the journey to Good Enough’s next phase: a collective of Good Enough people. We could make some cool, if janky, web toys alone, but with a few more people to play with…
Along came Lettini and Patrick and James and Cade. Each of us with a different set of skills and a different set of weaknesses.
Things definitely did become a lot more interesting once we teamed up! When my weaknesses got in the way, there was someone else to step into that gap and show me how it’s done. Hopefully others agree that I’m able to help them in some of the areas where I have a little more experience. 🤞
That’s enough reading for you; now it’s time to listen. Lettini, James, and I were recently asked to have a conversation on the IndieRails podcast. We are very thankful to Jeremy and Jess for this opportunity to talk about some of Good Enough’s short history. And luckily for you, we hardly talk about Rails at all!
Throughout our lovely discussion, the power of a team filled with complimentary skills kept resurfacing in my head. This experience cannot be recreated as a solo dev or by working on some project in my garage. The times where our skills don’t overlap makes this whole Good Enough experiment lovely and worthwhile. To my teammates, I thank you. You complete me!
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Jelly was #1 on Hacker News
Yesterday, Lettini took a chance and posted about Jelly on Hacker News, a discussion site notorious for it's mercurial population of tech-maybe-too-saavy experts. Jelly is a tough sell for some of them, those with the technical skill to pipe email at a low level through custom-built filters running on their own cloud servers.
I'm not going to lie to you. I was pretty nervous.
And yet...
Jelly at the top of Hacker News last night. At the time of writing, we've had over 100 comments and 281 "points" -
· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Fixing Broken Social Share Images in Twitter/X
I have an admission to make. Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Apple Messages for months. And it made me sad.
But in the past few months we got it fixed. And that made me very happy!
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Overriding Permalink Generation in FriendlyId
FriendlyId is a helpful Ruby gem that streamlines creating permalinks and slugs for Rails applications. In Pika we're using it to help with generating permalinks for blog posts and pages as well as slugs for tags. When a customer wrote in with a request to modify the behavior of these permalinks, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to override the default behavior. Turns out it wasn’t too bad!
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Say hello to Jelly: the simplest way to jam on email as a team
Dear readers, we need to apologize. We know some of you have noticed that Good Enough has gotten much quieter this year than last, across this blog, our newsletter, and socials. We’ve been heads down for the last few months on something new, but we’re now ready to come back up for air and hang with you again! We know you miss hearing from us.
So allow me to formally introduce Good Enough’s next product: Jelly! It’s a new shared inbox for teams. It’s a game-changer, and it’ll be out soon.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Fixing Broken Action Text Images in Atom Feeds
For a while now we've seen that images in our Pika atom feeds were not displaying in some feed readers. In fact, they weren't displaying in my own feed reader, which routes through Feedly. I was sad.
I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this. Compared our feed with a lot of atom and RSS feeds that worked. Eventually I came to a hair-brained idea: what if Rails's Action Text image display markup was confusing these feed readers?
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Grassroots
TLDNR: If you have an interest in Good Enough succeeding, we need your help! Telling friends, shouting on socials, and sharing links to our stuff with your favorite influencers–all of these things will help Good Enough succeed and continue making amazing stuff!
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Let's talk about conversations
If you subscribe to our newsletter — which you do, right? — then you'll know that recently we've been thinking about conversations.
We're a small group making fun software for people, and we like to have conversations with those people; the lovely folks who like our take on blogging or our super-simple contact form, or who want a copy of the zine, or who just want to say hello. We love talking to these people.
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· Barry Hess · TIL
TIL: Easily Support Gravatars in Rails
We’re building some software where we’d like to display avatars for email contacts even if they aren’t users of our software. While Gravatar is a relic of Web 2.0, we’ve found that there are still a significant number of people who have their email addresses in that system.
Here’s how I streamlined displaying an avatar for an email address if it exists in the Gravatar system.
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How We Built Unique Social Preview Images for Pika
One of the goals of Pika, the happy blogging software that we recently launched, is to help you find your own place on the internet. Along with a nice place on the internet, when you share links to your blog we want them to represent your internet home, which you've likely taken a little time to make just so. Sharing your blog on social networks, text messages, Slack, or wherever should be an experience that makes you smile, and that's why we built custom social preview images for your blog.
But how did we do it?