2024 Jopro Development Journal
Some random improvement notes as I come back to the platform with fresh eyes after a little while.
When I clear notifications it doesn't update the user bubble
There should be a clear all notifications thing
I am slightly annoyed when the journal notification time keeps changing every day by like an hour. (This is because of the way the notification system works based on the last notification time.)
Question answering is occasionally buggy.
Notifications only load like 5-6 at a time and when you clear them there's actually more
The ordering of the notebooks on the dashboard should be by most recently opened and pinned.
I've been quite caught up with other things, however I've been getting email reminders to update this journal. Because this project is on hiatus for the next month or so (I'm on the job hunt), it would be great if I had a few options from the email itself around snoozing reminders for a week/month or until I update the journal again. For example if I go on vacation the latter option would be super useful.
All images are now secured through the /api/images path. This only allows access to images that are scoped to the owner's notebooks or to public notebooks. This is super important as this now allows for images to be private whereas previously they had a public ACL and were served directly from S3.
While this is definitely less optimal for public notebooks, this is not a priority case we are optimizing for and ensuring uploaded images are private is more of a concern. We can always optimize later.
Of not significant interest since there is mostly test data, the changes also ensure backwards compatibility with existing images in all notebooks. Only new images are marked as private and then served through the /api/images pathway.
On a very positive note I finally created a jira board to track all the bugs that I've been listing out in the dev journal. There's currently around 14 being tracked, with 8 a priority to fix. I also broke down my launch plan into tasks! Overall I'm feeling good about being able to bring the product to market :)
I love this app, it really feels like my baby compared to all the other things I've built. I'll be focusing my next efforts on building a few protocols that have strong potential to bring in customers, as well as a protocol that I use frequently.
EMDR is a target, as it has the most organic search and a high potential to be helpful. I'll be including information in EMDR comparing it to expressive writing which I think falls along a similar path in terms of what it's trying to accomplish (restructuring beliefs and narratives)
Gratitude journaling is a target, and I'll include information about the effective gratitude protocol that we want to funnel people towards which isn't aligned to the traditional gratitude journaling practice that people think of. Still it's interesting to think about and we'll be including the traditional approach alongside research about it as a means to redirecting people towards effective gratitude practices.
Dream journaling is a target as it's also in high search frequency. However, I'm split as it's useful to use analytics and AI to summarize repeated patterns from dreams (which is the goal of dream journaling as far as I know, though I haven't researched it in depth), but also using a phone or computer might be undesirable for remembering dreams. Most people prefer physical paper. I'll need to do some research and see what people say.
Finally I also want to tackle weekly win journaling that is focused on efforts. I want in particular to have my weekly wins compacted into a weekly summary, as I write them throughout the week. I'll try to promote this as my own thing for productivity, however there isn't really a place to fit this in terms of what people are searching for. It will be more to promote it on it's own. It might be interesting since it's unique to try to promote this through the media, especially if I can put together a good research article on it.
Some of the features critical to implementing these are as follows
Step based journals, which has been implemented recently!
The EMDR widget, which can fit into the step protocol for EMDR. e.g. a setup question, and then the widget.
Synchronous analytics, that happen as part of step journals e.g. for expressive writing
Asynchronous analytics, that can happen daily, weekly, etc. for weekly win aggregation or for dream journal analysis.
I think the issue with the crawlers that I've been experiencing is related to + in the url. The issue comes up both on google search results (searching for site:jopro.app just returns the index pages for live.jopro.app) and none of the entries. Looking at ahrefs as well there are crawler errors for the individual entries.
I'm going to try to url encode the urls to see if that will help.
A few bugs found
Spacing is still weird, especially between paragraphs on prose XL
There is a bug when you directly enabling web publishing on a new journal. It throws an error.
There is a bug in error reporting on create journal/edit journal settings, where it complains about improperly formatted JSON from the backend sometime, which isn't the actual error.
The mobile layout of the journal editing is still messed up so that spacing is cramped and also you can't see the journal title on the publishing journal alias. The width of the editable input is less than a character wide.
When a journal doesn't have a display picture it still shows on the journal site, just as a broken image.
The redirect URL after open authing goes directly to the journal rather than the edit screen, when uploading the author image.
Editing journal settings should clear the cache, it persists the cache and the web site settings still show as the old thing.
Not a bug but an idea: give me an author profile that is a landing page for all my public journals e.g. kind of like a linktree. Not sure if there's a whole lot of use. But I like the idea of linking to one thing on socials for all my journals like hey here's my public notebooks.
Xing out notifications in the bubble menu results in layout shift due to the spinner size
The bubble menu goes beyond the screen height, making some notifications invisible (consider setting a max height to make it scrollable?)
There's an issue with the blog pages returning 500s to crawlers like google and ahrefs
Dates are still missing from the editor pages
Update on the PERMA questionnaire, according to https://www.peggykern.org/questionnaires.html seems like commercial use requires permission (and possibly licensing).
A small note today: I've been using Jopro more and more from my mobile phone in combination with my laptop. A concern I have is that if I have something on my laptop, go out and edit on my phone and then return to my laptop, it will overwrite what I had. It should be able to pull the latest content, and also potentially have an optimistic locking to prevent accidental overwrites. I don't need continuous editing, that's probably overkill, though I think tiptap supports that natively (you may have to pay for that). But definitely should do a bit more to load and save in a better way.
Really want to add happiness surveys using the new step chunks. Will need to look into the legality of using those surveys.
