030 — New Starter Packs Features

After a few weeks away I am back with some fresh updates that have been deployed to Starter Packs (https://www.starterpacks.net). The first—and best feature, imho—is the Quick Starter Pack Editor. This feature makes it easy to add people to your existing Bluesky Starter Packs in as little as 3 clicks (maybe more if you want to add them to multiple packs at the same time). This was a feature that I had wanted to add to the site since I started working on it, and I finally had the time—made the time—to sit down and build it out.

The next addition to the site is more for the curious, or the competitive, which is the Bluesky Starter Packs Leaderboards (https://www.starterpacks.net/leaderboard). Here you can find a list of the top Bluesky Starter Packs that people have joined Bluesky through either that week, or all-time. My hope is that these pages help to drive traffic to the site and encourage people to create and share more Starter Packs to try to climb the ranks.

I rolled out a few more features, but those were the main ones that made their way out. Now my focus is on building more value for the subscription plans and optimizing the site to appease the SEO gods so that more pages are indexed and available in search results. If you are interested in watching those updates come to life, I plan on live streaming those updates, so follow the channel (@ryan_hefner) and get notified when I go live.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment  #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Episode Transcript

Ryan (00:00):
Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, and this is the All
Play podcast. So I wanna giveyou a quick update on some stuff
that I've been working on. Youknow, I haven't had a a video
out in a couple or a podcastepisode out in a couple weeks.
Actually, I don't even know howlong it's been, to be honest.
But I have been busy. I've beenkinda getting back into the
groove of things. I'd say overthe last two or three weeks,

(00:24):
I've actually been doing somelive streaming and and making a
bunch of updates tostarterpacks.net, which is
basically the Bluesky kind ofstarter pack profile directory,
that you can kinda browse aroundand and check some stuff out
with. I've been working on thatand adding some features that
I've been wanting to add to thesite since basically the

(00:46):
conception of it.
And one of the biggest featuresthat I ended up adding to the
site is a quick starter packeditor. So essentially, it kinda
has two modes. For one, it it'sa it makes it very easy to add
profiles or people to existingstarter packs. So essentially,
anywhere you're on the site, ona profile, browsing a starter

(01:08):
pack, looking at someone'sfollow followers or people that
they're following, There's alittle plus, button next to the
profile avatar. You click that,it brings up a modal with all
your existing starter packs, andyou can select one or many of
those starter packs and add aperson to those starter packs.
Very quick and easy. Itdefinitely is a better kind of,

(01:30):
like, user experience thantrying to go and add someone via
the actual Blue Sky app to anexisting starter pack. So check
that out. I think it'll makeanyone who's trying to just,
like, maintain or groom astarter pack a little bit
easier. And it, I don't know.

(01:50):
It it it it makes it a lotnicer. The second kind of option
that it also allows you to do isso you can essentially see all
the existing starter packs thatyou have, but you can kinda go
into this new mode, which is,create a new starter pack. And
the cool thing about this iswhen you go into create new
starter pack, it basically addsa strip at the bottom of the
website. But that strip is kindof persistent, and you can

(02:12):
navigate anywhere. You can go toa profile.
You can go to a starter pack.You can drive around anywhere
you go, and anytime you hit thatplus button on those profiles,
they're gonna be added to thatstrip at the bottom. And it just
makes it very convenient so thatyou can either go from a starter
pack and add a few people ordrill into a profile and see

(02:32):
some people that they'refollowing or followers or
whatever and accumulate thesepeople that you're gonna add to
this new starter pack thatyou're working on. And
essentially, once you're done,you hit a little arrow, it
brings up the modal, and you canadd the name and description.
You save it, and it adds it toblue sky.
So that's super cool. I couldstill think there's probably
some little tweaks and stuffthat I need to do with it, but

(02:54):
it it feels good to have that asa feature on the site. And that
is free to anyone who connectstheir Blue Sky account, on
starterpacks.net. So check thatout. It's free.
Hopefully, if you have a starterpack and you wanna add some more
people to it, this would be abetter way to do that. And if
you don't have a starter pack, Idon't know, browse around, come

(03:16):
up with your bowling leaguestarter pack or whatever you got
going on. Yeah. Bullying isprobably not the thing. But,
yeah, check it out.
I also ended up adding, followall, which is seems like a a
pretty straightforward thing,but I didn't have that on the
existing starter pack page. Butnow anytime you're on a starter

(03:37):
pack page, you can click followon, you can follow all those
profiles. So similar tobasically how it works within
the Blue Sky app. And, that'sreally all I got there. I I
probably do need to do a fewlittle optimizations to that in
the future where right now, I'mbasically just getting all of
the DIDs for anyone who's inthat starter pack and sending
AlphaFollow call to Blue Sky.

(03:58):
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 chuckall these things in and fire out
the calls, and it'll only followthe people, obviously, that
you're not already following.But I could probably make fewer
requests to Blue Sky andoptimize that a little bit. So I

(04:20):
might go back and tweak that,but for now it's working and
it's good enough, for what Ineed, and it's kinda just checks
a box on the list of stuff toget done. The other thing I
ended up adding to the site,which is kinda cool, is a
leaderboard page.
And so essentially, Blue Sky hasa cool thing that they do with
starter packs where they keeptrack of the people who have

(04:42):
actually joined Blue Sky via anindividual starter pack. So
basically, you if you happen todiscover a starter pack, you
know, either, I don't know,shared on someone's blog or some
other social media site, and youclick and you go over to Blue
Sky, and you don't have a BlueSky account and you log up, you
sign up via, you know, thatstarter pack, it keeps a record

(05:06):
or basically increments anumber. And they have two
numbers that they they, keeptrack of. They have an all time
number as well as a weeklyrunning number. And so I created
two landing pages, a weekly andan all time, and it gives you a
rundown of the people who havejoined or the the starter packs
and the number of people whohave joined on there.

(05:26):
And it's just a kindainteresting way to explore,
starter packs and get a littlelook into the numbers that these
starter packs are are generatingas far as, like, recruiting
people to join Blue Sky. Andespecially 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

(05:48):
like a cool little I don't know.There might be some weird gaming
mechanics I could play aroundwith as far as, like, trying to,
you know, people trying to be,you know, the top pack for that
week or eventually get into theall time, top ranks and stuff
like that. So I just added twopages of the site, and, I don't

(06:09):
know.
It feels pretty good. So I feellike from, like, a feature
standpoint, the things I need toactually go through is actually
adding more features to kindabuild up and justify the paid
subscriptions on-site. Soessentially, there's the three.
I have the free, the expand, andthen the promote plan. The idea

(06:29):
with the expand plan is reallyto have some features that, I
guess, expand your, how should Iput it?
Like, make it to where it'seasier for you to discover

(06:51):
thing, either packs to be in orthe get notifications of packs
that you're being added to orremoved from. Really just kind
of, like, expand your awarenessof stuff to where you could
potentially, you know, expandthe the areas where people can

(07:12):
discover your, profile withinblue sky. And and obviously, the
more where you're discoverable,the more chances are to be
followed essentially. So I needto add some, like, alerting on
when you're either added orremoved from a pack and some
stuff like that. On the promoteside, I really was kinda going

(07:32):
back and forth on where toreally promote these profiles on
the site.
So one thing I did end upchanging and I do have the page
built, but I'm actually waitingfor some people to actually
start subscribing to these twodifferent plans before I
actually make make it go live.But I have a supporters page on
the website, and originally, wasthinking that only the people

(07:54):
with the promote plan would beshowcased on that page. Kinda
had a little change of heart. Ithink anyone who actually
supports the project viasubscription will be listed on
that page. The people who are onthe 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 theexpand plan will be listed below

(08:15):
and, I don't know, accessibleor, you know, promoted and and
showcased on that page, belowthe promoted people. So that
tweak is ready, but I'm waitingfor some people to actually
start subscribing to do that. SoI think I need to get the
alerting done and then maybethat'll help with, getting

(08:36):
people to subscribe to the, tothe plans. So along with that,
the one thing I'm realizing isthat it's just tough to actually
build sites that have a lot ofpages. So, I think that my focus
moving forward as far as like onstarter packs is digging in and

(09:00):
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 browsingfollowers or following, it only
loads the first fifty, and thenas you scroll, it continues to
load more. That's great from,like, a UX standpoint, and also

(09:22):
it does help with, like, theloading times on the pages
because I'm loading smallernumbers and, you know, you don't
have to have thousands of peoplepotentially, listed in these,
tabs when you're when the pageloads. But the thing that it
doesn't help with is reallycrawlability. And so you have
these these crawlers that aregoing around trying to, you

(09:43):
know, index pages and stuff, andso they're only getting the
first fifty results. So rightnow, I kinda currently have this
component that kinda comes inand it's using intersection
observer to fire off the nextloading of those, of the
different infinite results.
And that's working great, but Ineed to actually make that to
where that's like a a next pagelink. And so I would have like

(10:05):
page one, page two, page three,followers or following or
starter packs or whatever. Soanywhere on the site where I'm
doing this infinite scrolling,I'm gonna have to come up with,
like, a fallback of, like, somesort of pagination pageable, URL
structure that I can let thecrawlers have. But also, I wanna

(10:26):
make sure that it's nice so thatif a page gets indexed and and
somehow a user ends up on pagethree, that they're within the
context of, you know, the listthat they're supposed to be
looking at, and they can getback to page two and page one,
but also continue down to pagefour and page five if they have
to. So this is just one of thosethings you have to figure out
with, like, big sites and kindof balancing how much to load

(10:49):
for the user and how to loadthat in gracefully while they're
browsing it, and also appease,the crawlers that need to
basically have links and and goout.
So I'm hoping that by kind ofaddressing that, I'll be able to
increase the the crawlability ofthe site. Also, hopefully,
increase the indexing, of thepages and just get more people

(11:10):
to the site and try to buildsome more value there. So that's
probably what I'll be working onin the next couple livestreams,
and I might even start workingon chipping away at a new secret
project that I'm got bouncingaround in the head. But I'm
gonna leave it there. So thoseare some updates from
starterpacks.net.

(11:30):
I'll be doing live streams onall of the kind of optimizations
for the the paging and andcrawling stuff and and setting
that kind of stuff up as well asthe alerts for when people are
added and removed from starterpacks. So, you know, follow the
link in the show notes to myYouTube page, or if you're
watching this on YouTube rightnow, subscribe, and you'll get

(11:53):
notifications when I go live onthat 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 atallplay.fm, and follow me on
Bluesky @ryanhefner.com . Andwith that, we'll talk to you
later. Alright. Have a greatone. Later.