Season 3, Issue 26: 💌🐦👋📸

NYC’s new mascot, Lettinibird

1. Give Them Your Letterbird

We’re launching another product! Try out Letterbird here →

A few months back, Shawn asked how he can let strangers contact him without giving them his personal email address. He wanted a humble contact form, one he could personalize with his own style. It turns out acquiring one of those is more difficult than you’d expect if you don’t already have a website hosted on Squarespace or another expensive and complex website builder.

Letterbird is our attempt to bridge that gap—it’s a free contact form on the web. It’s well-designed out-of-the-box, and you can personalize it to your style. It’s simple by design, not trying to do more than you expect or need. You give us your name and email, we give you a good ol’ fashioned form, strangers get a nice experience getting in touch with you.

Here’s Shawn’s Letterbird:

And here’s friend-of-Good-Enough Jorge’s more colorful Letterbird:

We’re also using Letterbird for Good Enough, and our product support forms like Album Whale, Yay.Boo, Ponder, and Letterbird itself. It’s quite handy!

Letterbird is free for everyone, but it also has a paid Pro version for those who need it to do more. Right now the paid version will allow you to customize your form’s CSS to better fine-tune your style, accept file attachments, and hide our branding, but we envision a lot more useful (and fun) Pro capabilities over time.

Create your Letterbird, and let us know what you’d like it to do in the future! —Lettini

2. The Week That Was

As you can tell from above, the big focus this week has been on shipping Letterbird, but we’ve also been working hard on polishing Yay.Boo, and as we near the end of the Cosmic Maelstrom, Barry has taken the opportunity to scratch a long-time itch and build his perfect blogging software (codename: NOT BLOOGER). And globetrotters rejoice: we’ve added per-log timezone support to the not-yet-released Bumblelog, so loggers can now see exactly when and where each log was, erm, logged…

3. Lettini is Good Enough

It’s been an exciting year watching our subscriber numbers slowly grow as we build things, put them out into the world, and new people discover and start following Good Enough. Maybe that was your journey? If so, hello! Welcome! Nice to meet you. Thanks for being here. Keep your arms inside the ride at all times.

We put a lot of our small team into our products, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves! Read the first one over on our blog about our resident designer, the man behind the Screenis and pixels and Letterbirds.

4. Sharing is Caring

You said you want links? You’ve got…wait, you didn’t say you want links? Well…that seems like an oversight on your part. But we’ve got ya. Eat these links:

• This looks impressive.

• Next Halloween, why not adopt the recent Japanese tradition of “mundane costumes”, e.g. “Person who was about to be late for work, but then their train got delayed and now they are taking their time since they got a proof-of-delay ticket from the station.”

• How much longer are we going to collectively pretend that the Centennial Man Zuckerbot is human?

• Weapons research begins in the war against AI

• If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel and stared for a few minutes at the shower drain (and who hasn’t), then you will doubtless enjoy this “quiet observation of objects found in places of accommodation.”

5. In Conclusion

With all the Letterbird fervor over here the last couple of weeks, the team has been reading up on the history of mail delivery through homing pigeons, pigeoneering, and pigeon fancying. Half of the team (the ones located in or around New York) have had veritable pigeon-fever! Not the in-fection, mind you, but an a-ffection for the bird you can’t help but see all over the city streets. While the official branding for Letterbird is TBD, we plan to loosely base it on the (should be official) NYC mascot.

While street art should never be a competition, we’re curious which pigeon artist you like more: @caryncast or @c0rnqueen –

We like ‘em both!