Back
Post
Posted

Got any feedback, bug reports, or suggestions for WIP?

If you have any feedback for me, post it here. Of course you can also share it in the chat or email me personally.

People occasionally ask me what the best place is to share their ideas, so I figured I'd create a post for it. 😁


Suggestion:

Weekly/monthy overview that I can share on my socials. Like the WIP Year in Review you already made.

Cool idea. We can definitely do that. What would you like to see included? Same as the yearly review? I wonder if that gets repetitive after a while.

PH Makers sends you recap with (pending) todos and streaks.

Maybe you can create images that we can share on Twitter like #nomadlist.

Ah cool. We do have a personal daily digest email you can enable in settings. We also have a weekly digest, but that's for the whole community.

We can add a personal weekly/quarterly digest and/or add it to the existing community digest.

I like the image idea. We can definitely do something like that as well.

Riffing off this, Github's heatmap is really cool and would be a good fit for WIP.

We have something like this already: wip.chat/@emerson/stats

I'm actually in the process of improving it as the current implementation is a bit rough around the edges.

An option to see the timeline by events without grouping by user

I was just discussing this with @levelsio the other day.

Would you like it as an option or the default? I'm considering making it the default. So you see each todo individually ordered by date. Similar to how Twitter works.

I start to know individuals and their habits, to I pretty like the current view, but if you can keep the two views, yes, it can make sense to switch to the ungrouped view by default 👍

Or to keep WIP simple, maybe you can use the per-event view by default, and the grouped-by-user one only for people you follow?wip

So the nice thing about grouped-by-user is that you get the full context of what someone is working on today. One todo by itself might not always be meaningful, but by seeing the other things that person worked on today you get a good sense of what they are doing.

On the other hand, the downside is that every time someone posts a new todo it bumps up their whole list of that day. So as a viewer you start seeing the same content and you're not sure if there's anything you haven't seen it yet further down the page.

Perhaps there's an alternative solution possible. For example only showing the new todos (grouped per user), with the todos you've already seen hidden by a "See 4 more todos…" button. Although that would require us to start tracking which todos you've already seen. Or least a timestamp of when you last viewed the homepage. (anything created after that would be considered unseen).

Spotlight / highlighted tasks

I consider that WIP can be used as a kind of changelog, in long-running changelogs, you often have an introduction section that focuses on highlights and a way of seeing more if you care

Here is my inspiration: blog.golang.org/go1.14

Some people use the "Product Updates" feature for this, which lets you write rich text posts about your product. It requires you to do more writing, but the upside is that you can nicely summarise a bunch of different changes in one cohesive story.

That feature needs a lot of work though. It's not very discoverable to begin with, and when you publish a post it doesn't get much attention on the site.

What do you think of this solution? Being able to write a short post, optionally linking to certain todos.

Yes, it can be the solution, and I like the idea to have more work to do when you want to highlight something 👍

I think that:
1. it should be displayed on the timeline (don't know if it's the case today)
2. it should probably "count" as a done task for the author

It currently isn't displayed on the timeline. It totally should though!

Right now it doesn't count as a done todo either. I guess we could make it count for the streak, as writing a status update is indeed work. And having to create a todo "Wrote a product update" just after you wrote it on WIP seems like unnecessary work.

To keep the interface light but allow more customization, maybe we can try having something like this that affects CSS: www.conventionalcommits.org/e…

Basically, if you type [bugfix] the normal human-readable text, WIP knows that it's a bugfix and can update the CSS, it can also be cool to have some stats about the task kinds

I really like that! I've been toying with the idea of adding support for regular hashtags. I think it could open up a bunch of possibilities. For example grouping all #marketing tasks together. Or indeed #bugfix'es etc.

The reason I haven't implemented it just yet, is because it might get confusing having both regular hashtags and product hashtags.

I agree that hashtags would be better, maybe you can just reserve some keywords that can't be used as project hashtags?

We can allow any hashtag and just prioritize product hashtags. So if you tag something #bugfix it will first check if you have a product with that hashtag. If so, it will link to your product. If not, it will be a regular hashtag.

Shorten displayed URLs in the generated HTML, I like the way Twitter is doing it

I never noticed this to be honest. But you're right. If there's a long URL in a tweet, it only shows the first X number of characters.

I haven't really found long URLs to be an issue on WIP, but I will keep that idea in mind. Wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Add a way of "clapping" a task and not only the comments

I've been on the fence for this one as I think it's a two-edged sword.

One the one hand it's a useful way showing someone you saw their todos and appreciate it. Not everything warrants a written comment.

But on the other hand, it's so easy those claps can quickly lose their meaning. And only a lack of claps remains meaningful, but in a bad way.

It wouldn't be too hard to run an experiment for a few weeks and see what happens. It's a relatively easy feature to build. (We actually experimented with this same idea, but only available through the chat. So the foundation is already built).

What if you add a small set of icons to show "reactions", like the one's at FB?

Yeah those those are fun, but also have their downsides. Basecamp wrote a great article about it: Introducing Boosts: an all-new way to show your support in Basecamp

Their approach is quite interesting too. I prototyped it for WIP, but eventually settled on regular comments.

But it's definitely something we can explore. We could have one type of reaction (👏), multiple types (e.g. 👏 😍 😢 🎉), or allow any emoji like Slack has:

Here's the shortlist used by GitHub

Fyi, the 👍&👎 emojis are used as vote counters and their sums are directly made available from the API

Open-source WIP so we can make pull-requests? :)

I did consider this for a long time. But people who've done this often say it's a lot of work to manage contributions. So I'm not so sure anymore it's worth the trade-off.

There's also a decent risk of people straight out copying our hard work for their own personal gain. Even if the license would not allow it. This is already happening to some extent (people straight up copy our design, copy, etc to make a competing product).

Okay okay,

My two cents, what makes WIP to be WIP is the people on it :)

Personally, I dislike the recent change that put roasts and questions above the timeline, I think they are valuable, but I don't like having to scroll to see the timeline which is my focus

Maybe you can consider switching them to blocks?

Or maybe better, to hide them as soon as you read them, you can only see unread ones and the ones you follow with unread comments?

100% agree. We wanted a way to show roasts on the homepage and this was the quickest way. I agree it's taking up too much space. We'll fix that.

Some kind of course program to help beginning makers

👍 I like that idea. I often get the same questions anyway. I will write some guides which can later be turned into a course of sorts. Might follow up asking for a guest post of you as well if you're down.

Maybe we can recycle this -> github.com/marckohlbrugge/wip…

Also, what about creating a WIP GitHub org that can be joined by paid members to manages those community-driven resources?

Can you also add in this guide or help section the supported format used in the todo body? I tried using Markdown-style links ([title](url)), but can't get something like you

I'm considering switching to a rich text editor for comments. It would also make it easier to add inline images, etc. I'm not 100% sure yet.

The [title](url) you tried should work. Make sure to start the URL with http:// (or https://)

Maybe some kind of roadmap type course thingy? I know @camerondare is building that for Gamequitters, I might do similar for Nomad List

Not sure what this means. Can you elaborate or do you have an example?

Show mentions on user profile pages

I.e., "made cool stuff with @marc" -> available on your wip.chat/@marc page

It can increase collaboration or bug report (you and @levelsio often use the "cc"/"h/t" mention for fixed bug reports)

What if you could "retweet" someone else's todo?

Then if you do get mentioned, you can choose whether to have it show up on your profile by retweeting or not.

It would also let you amplify todos where you're not directly mentioned. Perhaps because it's something really interesting, but it might be from a less known maker.

If WIP were to become more of a Twitter-like social network where you can follow people (recently launched a prototype of this) then it might make sense to add such a feature.

Yep that makes sense 👍, not everyone will be happy to be forced having others entries on their timelines

Implement browser push notifications

Good idea! Will need to research how to do this.

Btw, if while implementing it, can you consider make something available for API developers to be notified too?

I'm not sure graphql is very cool for streaming APIs, but maybe a simple outgoing webhook would be enough

Hey @marc, I plan to automate sending a message on a discord channel with the changelog of #sgtm.

It would be nice if you provide a webhook system or maybe just an RSS for now? this way I can easily configure posting with Zapier :)

Yes, Zapier integration would be very useful for a bunch of things. Definitely want to add this at some point.

RSS would be quicker to implement. But there's a bunch of different ways to implement it. And people might have different preferences depending on the integration they want to build.

I'll give this some thought the coming days. Feel free to ping me in a week to check the status.

👍 the advantage of RSS is that you can have multiple RSS alternatives for the same page, maybe you can try with something that seems ok for you and later see if it is worth making alternatives?

SEO improvements:

👍 I haven't spend much time on SEO, because it doesn't immediately provide value for existing members. But as we want to grow WIP, it does make sense to leverage our content and showing up on more search result pages.

These are some excellent suggestions. I'll add them to my list. Thanks!

Possible suggestion: Allow products to be 'sunset' or discontinued, rather than deleted completely.

Yes please 💀

👍 or when the project continue without you (exit)

Ah yes, I want this myself as well. I've got a bunch of products I no longer work on but I don't want to delete them from my profile.

What if we call this "archiving" a product? They would be hidden under a "Show archived products…" link on your profile. And perhaps those product pages would include a prominent "Archived" label.

This would allow you to archive products that are sunset, sold, on-hold, etc.

/cc @Bjornftw @moul

Yep, just a suggestion, archiving them should not make them read-only, sometimes you want to share some cool milestones that other did without you

Not sure if this is the move, but maybe separate personal products vs work products?

Say we added a way to distinguish between personal and work products, how should we use that?

Perhaps streaks should not take into account personal todos. Anything else?

Are you interested in seeing personal products at all?

I personally like to see the personal stuff of other people :)

Maybe just a filter to "hide non-pro stuff"?

Yeah, it's definitely a tough call if you were to do this, how should it be done?

Some rapid fire thoughts:

The majority of people on this site have two "work in progress" categories.

The first being their businesses.

The second being themselves (Gym, meditation, whatever).

So I think it'd be cool to have two streaks, one personal, one business, to encourage some balance.

I think if this is done, and done right (The hard part), it could be really cool.

I wonder if a personal streak makes much sense though?

I think at that point product-specific streaks are more useful. So you can earn a streak for going to the gym regularly. But of course, having to do so daily would probably be too much for most people.

We could make those product-specific streaks customisable as they are more personal by definition anyway. You could just set your own goal (e.g. every other day). But then it's starting to sound quite convoluted.

Anyway. Adding a way to mark products as personal and not have them count towards the streak might get us most of the way there.

There should be a way to prioritize pending todos, like drag & drop to reorder tasks.

Try click+holding on this icon. You can drag them. The feature is pretty hidden, though 😅

I've been having a very annoying bug on the macOS app 😬

Sometimes my entries don't get saved (I suppose the app sometimes doesn't make the request at all). The only way I can know if it worked, it's by seeing the notification of the entry in the WIP Telegram group