026 — Starter Packs Updates

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

After last week’s Jam Session with Brian Casel, I was on the fence on which project I wanted to commit to in 2025. After that conversation, and a little reflection, I realized that I wanted to see Starter Packs through to the original vision for the project. Also, the amount of effort to get it there—I think—will be less than I had originally thought, now that some of my client work has chilled out a bit.

With that said, I am excited to share some initial updates that I pushed to the site yesterday that lay the foundation for the initial vision. They include:

• ability to log in with your Bluesky account
• quick follow/unfollow people from Starter Packs or Profile pages
• a bunch of design updates, including full support for both light and dark mode
• optimizations under the hood for loading various data from Bluesky, like followers and starter packs
• some–🤞–updates to some of the page metadata in hopes it will make Google happy again and start driving some lost traffic back

I am still committed to getting an early version of Open Graphs out in March, like I committed to Brian on the episode, but luckily that work will also benefit Starter Packs, since I will be using Starter Packs, and my other sites, as early consumers of the open graph images that Open Graphs will be generating.

In the meantime, more updates will be rolling out to Starter Packs over the coming days, including: Follow All on Starter Packs, along with the background work that will start to link profiles with the packs they have been added to as a premium feature to subscribe to on the site. We’ll see how subscriptions will go, and I am sure I am going to have to build some real value to justify them, but I also have some plans on how to make the experience of unlocking the packs kind of fun, and hopefully notable.

Watch the latest episodes on YouTube at: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuFdIOfmEGP0xvjt2yng9FErsMTVTk1Of&si=H0RpnIlvOhwg5Q2j

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplay.fm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
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