1. What software do you pay for?
Here’s a question: do you pay for software? We do, but lots of people don’t. Part of our bet is that people – like you – will be happy to pay for software that does simple things well and is a pleasure to use, but we also know how attractive free can be (even if it means that you become the product).
So, our one main thing this week: what software do you personally pay for? Do you like it? Do you love it? Hit reply, please! —James
2. The Week That Was
Our focus continues to be on Letterbird (the little contact form that could) and Pika (easy and beautiful blogging), with our enormous and powerful brains gradually tilting away from “just build it” and towards “also help people find it”.
For Letterbird, we improved the embed code that lets you put the form directly into your existing site, making it easier to put your Letterbird on Google Sites, Postcard.page, and other website builders.
For Pika, we’re preparing a great new feature to sit alongside your blog posts. More on that next week probably! (Speaking of Pika, another product named “Pika” made a bit of a splash this week. It’s an AI thing so we are quietly betting that it won’t really matter in a few months 😅) —James
3. Midnight
An app I recently bought and love is Ensō. It's a quirky little writing app that makes it hard to edit. Why would that be good? Because when you're writing (like I am now), you can get caught up in editing instead of flowing with your writing.
Ensō is designed and built by a lovely human named Rafał, who has a fascinating blog where he shares thoughts ranging from philosophical to technical. Spend half an hour with them, you won’t regret it. Also, what a wonderful all-hands-meeting simulation he’s made.
4. lastyear.singles
In response to last week’s Album Whale end-of-year lists, Jonny Thaw emailed us about his project, lastyears.singles. It’s a gorgeous site that lets you listen to all those end-of-the-year song lists. Spoiler alert: Billboard chose a country song as their top song of the year. Crazy!
I love this project and asked Jonny how he built it:
The origin of the site was simply the fact that me and my friend (now housemate) loved listening to the Pitchfork 100 list and I wanted to make an accompanying thing to track which ones we liked. Actually an earlier iteration is up still. Then I figured it'd be cool to scour some more lists and just aggregate them in that ideology of "if I like doing this, maybe some other people will too". All the code is actually on Github, it’s just very messy.
I have scrapers set up to help me structure the data from the various sources, there's a manual step of filling in the Spotify track id and the YouTube link for each track, but there's a little GUI that runs for that. But it was all in the idea that it's quite fun to make a 'sort of' free music player website.
Go listen to some music on lastyear.singles (it works best if you sign into Spotify) and share it with your music loving friends! Then go do the same on Album Whale! —Shawn
5. In Conclusion
This will be our penultimate visit into your inbox for 2023. I’ve really enjoyed our time together, and I hope you have too! Stick around for next week: we’ll bring mince pies and mull some wine around the ol’ yule log. It’s going to be seasonal as fuck.
Wherever you are, friend, keep warm. See you next time. —James