Everblog: One Year Later

Everblog, my first legit side project, has been out in the wild for more than a year.  I’ve been wanting to make a blog post about some of the lessons I have learned since I first launced the site a year ago. I have so many ideas for posts that I’ll be making a series about the lessons learned from taking a project from a cool idea to something that is actually used by people all over the world.

What Is Everblog?

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Straight from the meta description on the homepage, “EverBlog is the quickest and easiest way to start blogging straight from Evernote.” If you are not familiar with Evernote, it is a set of applications to manage notes from every device imaginable. You can create notes from the web, emails, or via desktop and mobile apps. Since it’s so easy to make a note, my goal was to make it just as easy to create a blog post on your site. You are reading a post hosted on the platform, so I think I can safely say, “Mission Accomplished!”

I started working on this project as part of the the 2012 Evernote Dev Cup. I’ve been all talk on many ideas for web apps and have never followed through on making one. Everblog seemed to be the right size for me to tackle. From a technical stand point it wasn’t too big, but it was still challenging enough to keep me interested. The Dev Cup worked great to time box my project, I had a deadline I needed to make. So I went for it.

How Will Posts Be Broken Up

One of the challenges of creating a web app by yourself is that you have to wear many hats. You do everything from writing code to resetting passwords to creating videos to promote the site. I’ve tried to split things up into my role as a Developer, Support, and as a Product Manager. I figured these roles where unique enough to highlight certain areas but still have a significant amount of overlap. I am still figuring out the topics I’ll talk about so this won’t be the final list. Here is what I have so far:

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  • Product
    • The Other Elephant In the Room: Postach.io
    • User Feedback: Do’s And Dont’s
    • Building An App That Depends On Another Platform
  • Support
    • Dealing With Evernote’s Security Breach And Having All Your Users Reset Their Authentication Token
    • You Should Be Emailing Your Users From Day One!
    • Random Stats About Everblog
  • Developer
  • Dev / Support
    • “I’d pay for your site!” – Is a Payment System the First Feature You Build?
    • “Can you reset my password?” – Every Feature you Need Before You Go Live… And Those That You Don’t 😉
    • Things You Shouldn’t Forget To Do When You Rebrand
    • How To Walk Away: Breaking Up With A Project
  • Dev / Product
    • Custom Vs. Template: Is .Net / C# A Good Choice When Users Want Custom Pages?
    • How Do You Say Blog In German?
    • Us Vs. Them: Is This Site For You Or Your Customers?
  • Product / Support
    • RTM: What Manual?
    • How Not To Introduce New Features To Your Users
    • Work-Life-Work Balance: Maintaining A Side Project And Reactions To “The Old Reader” Shutting Down

Goals Of These Posts

  • Share some of the things I’ve learned so you can make your first (or second, or third) project amazing
  • Open up a dialog. Did I do something wrong? Did I not learn something obvious? Let me know!
  • Start blogging on a regular schedule