1. The Week That Was

Last week Shawn talked about the good fortunes of his favorite basketball team. This week I get to talk about my favorite baseball team (Minnesota Twins) relinquishing first place in their division for the first time since April 10th. Actually, I don’t want to talk about it. Their division is terrible and the team is terrible and some big things will have to happen to make me care much about them for the rest of the summer. (This gives me more time for my burgeoning Immaculate Grid addiction.) Then maybe I can start getting excited for the fall and Timberwolves basketball. LOL. No.

Oh, we launched a thing! Quack (Beta) is a front-end implementation of an idea we had to provide a link to beautifully rendered markdown text. We think it’s quite pretty, fun, and a little unwieldy, but also useful! In case you’re curious, I wrote about the Why and the How.

Aside from launching Quack (Beta)… Lettini has also been hacking on one of our cosmic prototypes as well as helping us to give Spinal a try as a means to update the Good Enough blog. Arun has been playing with an elevated browser editing experience. And Patrick has been putting on his project management hat for a very exciting project or two. He’s feeling purple. ––BH

2. Taking a break

From late June to late July the Good Enough team has a flurry of absences. When Shawn and I started this company, one of our big challenges was wanting to balance our time between work and family. When our children are out of school in the summer, it is important to us to spend time with them and make memories as families.

It turns out our entire team is on a similar page as us! So almost everyone is taking a break in this stretch of time for various different vacations, downtimes, friend visits and more. The one person who isn’t taking time off now is planning for a good break later in the summer. Oh, and James is going to be visiting Patrick. We best have pictures soon! ––BH

3. At the Movies

Summer is a time for pools, beaches, vacations, getting outdoors, and getting indoors. Blockbuster summer movies have already started rolling in as a perfect way to catch some air-conditioned entertainment. Recently I was excited to learn about an entire, exhaustive playlist of Siskel & Ebert episodes from all of the show’s incarnations. I haven’t (re-)watched a single episode yet, but I surely will. My parents owned a small town movie theater for about fifteen years. In part because of that I would enjoy listening to Siskel & Ebert fight with each other about a movie on lazy weekend afternoons. If I had to pick a critic that I am most likely to align with, it would be Roger Ebert. (Check out the wonderful documentary, Life Itself, if you’re curious.) I don’t agree with him across the board, but we jive a lot more than we disagree.

This playlist also has me looking forward to summer movie season! I’m particularly interested in what my kids want to see this summer. One movie they’re excited about that I’m not too interested in is The Little Mermaid (live action). I’m not as strongly against Disney princesses as some are, but these live action remakes have generally felt, ironically, lifeless. They’d also like to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which brings about a morbid curiosity in me. We all want to see Barbie. The collection of talent around that movie is just too fascinating to resist.

And, yes, we’ve already seen, and loved, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse! ––BH

4. We Out

Thanks for catching up on our happenings here at Good Enough. With all the break-taking we’re doing, it looks like next week we’re down to one lonely soul, and that means no newsletter for the people. Look for us to be back at it in mid-July. In the meantime, please send us a postcard from your vacation! Our address is at the bottom of this email.

1. The Week That Was

Yay.Boo continued to have our heart, but not as many of our hours this week. There have been some lovely tweaks and touches as it continues rolling toward a lovely settling place – a very nice first version that we can share more widely in order to see how the Internet world reacts.

A larger chunk of our time went toward Letterbird, which is getting excitingly close to launching as a good and proper product! The team has learned a lot about the modern state of subscription billing, and we have some PRO features to go along with that soon-to-be-unleashed, credit-card-accepting payment form.

The Guestbook printer keeps on printing! (Thankfully at a more reasonable rate this week.) With printing comes scanning and posting and you should just bathe in the gloriousness of the guestbook gallery on a Friday. Thank you for your drawings!

2. Do You Blog?

As Good Enough properly got real this year, we’ve all had to learn or relearn how to write publicly on a blog (and newsletter!). It feels like a thing that was so common (online) twenty years ago, and is so uncommon now. Yes, I know it wasn’t actually common (everywhere) twenty years ago, and it’s actually more common now. Yet these days blogs are not as common of places to visit (in relation to the whole of Internet traffic). These relative terms are probably even more painful to read than they were to write.

Do you blog? Would you blog privately amongst a group of friends? Do you ever find yourself crafting an x-tweet and get frustrated trying to chop it down to the right number of characters? Or do you just journal quietly to yourself? Do you do it all? Do you not do it for a very specific reason?

The messages I receive from Micro.blog and Mastodon and my RSS feeds are that everyone is retreating back to their own sites and/or their own domains. Everyone is remembering fondly that twenty-years-ago life. Everyone wants to get away from the algorithm and read the weekly musings of the everyday people. Everyone wants to recapture that feeling of discovery when they find some blogger who just gets them. Everyone wants to write some missives to the world, fishing for kindred spirits.

I believe that I’m in an echo chamber. I wonder if that chamber extends to readers of this newsletter? I wonder if that chamber is small or maybe rather big? I wonder.

If you have any thoughts, please reply to this newsletter and share ‘em! —Barry

3. I’m feeling crabby.

Suburban America goes absolutely crazy for Halloween these days. Every yard in our neighborhood is full of giant, inflatable pumpkins, spiders, and Tim Burton monsters. And oh, the skeletons! If you had told me 10 years ago that I could have made a killing selling 12 ft tall light-up lawn skeletons, I would have laughed in your face. Where do people store these things!?

Our yard isn’t adding much to the ambiance around here, but we are planning to do it up with a group costume. It’s the first Halloween where my daughter has a solid understanding of the concept and I am here for it. At her insistence, the Filler family will be dressing up as characters from Moana: “I am Moana. Mommy is Maui. Vinny is Hei Hei. Daddy is Tamatoa.”

Tamatoa is a giant crab with an eye for the finer things, so we decided it justified something of a splurge on the actual costume. I gotta say: this purchase appears to have been 100% worth it. It’s super fun, good quality, a nice likeness, and she absolutely, completely believes I am going to scoop her up and dangle her over my mouth for a midday snack.

It does make typing hard, though. —Patrick

4. In Conclusion

We are quite excited by what’s to come in November. We will be refreshing our knowledge on accepting payments and (hopefully) talking with customers. We will be learning more about getting the word out there for these products. And we have some more ideas and experiments that we’ll start working on to keep this year Cosmic until the end.

Stay human, friends.

1. Give Them Your Letterbird

We’re launching another product! Try out Letterbird here →

A few months back, Shawn asked how he can let strangers contact him without giving them his personal email address. He wanted a humble contact form, one he could personalize with his own style. It turns out acquiring one of those is more difficult than you’d expect if you don’t already have a website hosted on Squarespace or another expensive and complex website builder.

Letterbird is our attempt to bridge that gap—it’s a free contact form on the web. It’s well-designed out-of-the-box, and you can personalize it to your style. It’s simple by design, not trying to do more than you expect or need. You give us your name and email, we give you a good ol’ fashioned form, strangers get a nice experience getting in touch with you.

Here’s Shawn’s Letterbird:

And here’s friend-of-Good-Enough Jorge’s more colorful Letterbird:

We’re also using Letterbird for Good Enough, and our product support forms like Album Whale, Yay.Boo, Ponder, and Letterbird itself. It’s quite handy!

Letterbird is free for everyone, but it also has a paid Pro version for those who need it to do more. Right now the paid version will allow you to customize your form’s CSS to better fine-tune your style, accept file attachments, and hide our branding, but we envision a lot more useful (and fun) Pro capabilities over time.

Create your Letterbird, and let us know what you’d like it to do in the future! —Lettini

2. The Week That Was

As you can tell from above, the big focus this week has been on shipping Letterbird, but we’ve also been working hard on polishing Yay.Boo, and as we near the end of the Cosmic Maelstrom, Barry has taken the opportunity to scratch a long-time itch and build his perfect blogging software (codename: NOT BLOOGER). And globetrotters rejoice: we’ve added per-log timezone support to the not-yet-released Bumblelog, so loggers can now see exactly when and where each log was, erm, logged…

3. Lettini is Good Enough

It’s been an exciting year watching our subscriber numbers slowly grow as we build things, put them out into the world, and new people discover and start following Good Enough. Maybe that was your journey? If so, hello! Welcome! Nice to meet you. Thanks for being here. Keep your arms inside the ride at all times.

We put a lot of our small team into our products, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves! Read the first one over on our blog about our resident designer, the man behind the Screenis and pixels and Letterbirds.

4. Sharing is Caring

You said you want links? You’ve got…wait, you didn’t say you want links? Well…that seems like an oversight on your part. But we’ve got ya. Eat these links:

• This looks impressive.

• Next Halloween, why not adopt the recent Japanese tradition of “mundane costumes”, e.g. “Person who was about to be late for work, but then their train got delayed and now they are taking their time since they got a proof-of-delay ticket from the station.”

• How much longer are we going to collectively pretend that the Centennial Man Zuckerbot is human?

• Weapons research begins in the war against AI

• If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel and stared for a few minutes at the shower drain (and who hasn’t), then you will doubtless enjoy this “quiet observation of objects found in places of accommodation.”

5. In Conclusion

With all the Letterbird fervor over here the last couple of weeks, the team has been reading up on the history of mail delivery through homing pigeons, pigeoneering, and pigeon fancying. Half of the team (the ones located in or around New York) have had veritable pigeon-fever! Not the in-fection, mind you, but an a-ffection for the bird you can’t help but see all over the city streets. While the official branding for Letterbird is TBD, we plan to loosely base it on the (should be official) NYC mascot.

While street art should never be a competition, we’re curious which pigeon artist you like more: @caryncast or @c0rnqueen –

We like ‘em both!