Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. So I wanna give you a quick update on some stuff that I've been working on. You know, I haven't had a a video out in a couple or a podcast episode out in a couple weeks.

Actually, I don't even know how long it's been, to be honest. But I have been busy. I've been kinda getting back into the groove of things. I'd say over the last two or three weeks, I've actually been doing some live streaming and and making a bunch of updates to starterpacks.net, which is basically the Bluesky kind of starter pack profile directory, that you can kinda browse around and and check some stuff out with. I've been working on that and adding some features that I've been wanting to add to the site since basically the conception of it.

And one of the biggest features that I ended up adding to the site is a quick starter pack editor. So essentially, it kinda has two modes. For one, it it's a it makes it very easy to add profiles or people to existing starter packs. So essentially, anywhere you're on the site, on a profile, browsing a starter pack, looking at someone's follow followers or people that they're following, There's a little plus, button next to the profile avatar. You click that, it brings up a modal with all your existing starter packs, and you can select one or many of those starter packs and add a person to those starter packs.

Very quick and easy. It definitely is a better kind of, like, user experience than trying to go and add someone via the actual Blue Sky app to an existing starter pack. So check that out. I think it'll make anyone who's trying to just, like, maintain or groom a starter pack a little bit easier. And it, I don't know.

It it it it makes it a lot nicer. The second kind of option that it also allows you to do is so you can essentially see all the existing starter packs that you have, but you can kinda go into this new mode, which is, create a new starter pack. And the cool thing about this is when you go into create new starter pack, it basically adds a strip at the bottom of the website. But that strip is kind of persistent, and you can navigate anywhere. You can go to a profile.

You can go to a starter pack. You can drive around anywhere you go, and anytime you hit that plus button on those profiles, they're gonna be added to that strip at the bottom. And it just makes it very convenient so that you can either go from a starter pack and add a few people or drill into a profile and see some people that they're following or followers or whatever and accumulate these people that you're gonna add to this new starter pack that you're working on. And essentially, once you're done, you hit a little arrow, it brings up the modal, and you can add the name and description. You save it, and it adds it to blue sky.

So that's super cool. I could still think there's probably some little tweaks and stuff that I need to do with it, but it it feels good to have that as a feature on the site. And that is free to anyone who connects their Blue Sky account, on starterpacks.net. So check that out. It's free.

Hopefully, if you have a starter pack and you wanna add some more people to it, this would be a better way to do that. And if you don't have a starter pack, I don't know, browse around, come up with your bowling league starter pack or whatever you got going on. Yeah. Bullying is probably not the thing. But, yeah, check it out.

I also ended up adding, follow all, which is seems like a a pretty straightforward thing, but I didn't have that on the existing starter pack page. But now anytime you're on a starter pack page, you can click follow on, you can follow all those profiles. So similar to basically how it works within the Blue Sky app. And, that's really all I got there. I I probably do need to do a few little optimizations to that in the future where right now, I'm basically just getting all of the DIDs for anyone who's in that starter pack and sending AlphaFollow call to Blue Sky.

I'm not really not really, like, checking whether or not you're already following them. Thankfully, Blue Sky knows that already, and I can just chuck all these things in and fire out the calls, and it'll only follow the people, obviously, that you're not already following. But I could probably make fewer requests to Blue Sky and optimize that a little bit. So I might go back and tweak that, but for now it's working and it's good enough, for what I need, and it's kinda just checks a box on the list of stuff to get done. The other thing I ended up adding to the site, which is kinda cool, is a leaderboard page.

And so essentially, Blue Sky has a cool thing that they do with starter packs where they keep track of the people who have actually joined Blue Sky via an individual starter pack. So basically, you if you happen to discover a starter pack, you know, either, I don't know, shared on someone's blog or some other social media site, and you click and you go over to Blue Sky, and you don't have a Blue Sky account and you log up, you sign up via, you know, that starter pack, it keeps a record or basically increments a number. And they have two numbers that they they, keep track of. They have an all time number as well as a weekly running number. And so I created two landing pages, a weekly and an all time, and it gives you a rundown of the people who have joined or the the starter packs and the number of people who have joined on there.

And it's just a kinda interesting way to explore, starter packs and get a little look into the numbers that these starter packs are are generating as far as, like, recruiting people to join Blue Sky. And especially with since, you know, with everything that's going on, it seems like Blue Sky is kinda becoming more and more popular. I think this could be kind of like a cool little I don't know. There might be some weird gaming mechanics I could play around with as far as, like, trying to, you know, people trying to be, you know, the top pack for that week or eventually get into the all time, top ranks and stuff like that. So I just added two pages of the site, and, I don't know.

It feels pretty good. So I feel like from, like, a feature standpoint, the things I need to actually go through is actually adding more features to kinda build up and justify the paid subscriptions on-site. So essentially, there's the three. I have the free, the expand, and then the promote plan. The idea with the expand plan is really to have some features that, I guess, expand your, how should I put it?

Like, make it to where it's easier for you to discover thing, either packs to be in or the get notifications of packs that you're being added to or removed from. Really just kind of, like, expand your awareness of stuff to where you could potentially, you know, expand the the areas where people can discover your, profile within blue sky. And and obviously, the more where you're discoverable, the more chances are to be followed essentially. So I need to add some, like, alerting on when you're either added or removed from a pack and some stuff like that. On the promote side, I really was kinda going back and forth on where to really promote these profiles on the site.

So one thing I did end up changing and I do have the page built, but I'm actually waiting for some people to actually start subscribing to these two different plans before I actually make make it go live. But I have a supporters page on the website, and originally, was thinking that only the people with the promote plan would be showcased on that page. Kinda had a little change of heart. I think anyone who actually supports the project via subscription will be listed on that page. The people who are on the promote plan will obviously be promoted kind of higher up, on that page and a little bit more featured with bigger cards.

And anyone else who has the expand plan will be listed below and, I don't know, accessible or, you know, promoted and and showcased on that page, below the promoted people. So that tweak is ready, but I'm waiting for some people to actually start subscribing to do that. So I think I need to get the alerting done and then maybe that'll help with, getting people to subscribe to the, to the plans. So along with that, the one thing I'm realizing is that it's just tough to actually build sites that have a lot of pages. So, I think that my focus moving forward as far as like on starter packs is digging in and trying to make it to where the, one of the things I ended up doing was basically using, like, infinite scrolling kind of stuff.

So, like, when you're browsing followers or following, it only loads the first fifty, and then as you scroll, it continues to load more. That's great from, like, a UX standpoint, and also it does help with, like, the loading times on the pages because I'm loading smaller numbers and, you know, you don't have to have thousands of people potentially, listed in these, tabs when you're when the page loads. But the thing that it doesn't help with is really crawlability. And so you have these these crawlers that are going around trying to, you know, index pages and stuff, and so they're only getting the first fifty results. So right now, I kinda currently have this component that kinda comes in and it's using intersection observer to fire off the next loading of those, of the different infinite results.

And that's working great, but I need to actually make that to where that's like a a next page link. And so I would have like page one, page two, page three, followers or following or starter packs or whatever. So anywhere on the site where I'm doing this infinite scrolling, I'm gonna have to come up with, like, a fallback of, like, some sort of pagination pageable, URL structure that I can let the crawlers have. But also, I wanna make sure that it's nice so that if a page gets indexed and and somehow a user ends up on page three, that they're within the context of, you know, the list that they're supposed to be looking at, and they can get back to page two and page one, but also continue down to page four and page five if they have to. So this is just one of those things you have to figure out with, like, big sites and kind of balancing how much to load for the user and how to load that in gracefully while they're browsing it, and also appease, the crawlers that need to basically have links and and go out.

So I'm hoping that by kind of addressing that, I'll be able to increase the the crawlability of the site. Also, hopefully, increase the indexing, of the pages and just get more people to the site and try to build some more value there. So that's probably what I'll be working on in the next couple livestreams, and I might even start working on chipping away at a new secret project that I'm got bouncing around in the head. But I'm gonna leave it there. So those are some updates from starterpacks.net.

I'll be doing live streams on all of the kind of optimizations for the the paging and and crawling stuff and and setting that kind of stuff up as well as the alerts for when people are added and removed from starter packs. So, you know, follow the link in the show notes to my YouTube page, or if you're watching this on YouTube right now, subscribe, and you'll get notifications when I go live on that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I'm gonna leave it there. Again, I'm Ryan Hefner. This is the All Play podcast.

You can find me podcast at allplay.fm, and follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com . And with that, we'll talk to you later. Alright. Have a great one. Later.