Good Enough

Album Listening in Album Whale

Back in March we added Album Search in Album Whale. This was a very nice update because it meant you no longer had to first grab an album share link from a music service (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, etc) in order to save an album to a list. You can just head straight to Album Whale and do it all there.

Today we’ve added another feature to Album Whale with a similar goal in mind, this time on the other end of the spectrum: now you can listen to an album right in Album Whale! No more needing to jump over to a music service first to do so.

Hover over any album artwork and you’ll find a green ▶︎ play button, which opens a dialog containing music service embeds for that album, like this:

A gif of the new album listening in Album Whale

While amazing for discovering new music quickly, I’ve also found it very useful for my own To Try list. Now this entire flow can happen within Album Whale after hearing of a new album I want to listen to at some point:

  1. Add it to my To Try list in Album Whale using search

  2. Listen to it right in Album Whale

  3. If I like it, copy it to another list in Album Whale (oh ya, this is another small feature we added!)

A couple more notes:

  • For albums added to Album Whale using a Bandcamp share link, those green play buttons just link back to Bandcamp.

  • At least for Spotify, I found I needed to be logged into Spotify on the web to have their embeds in Album Whale play the whole album, not just a preview. This might also be true for other music services.

We hope you discover many great new tunes this summer!

Listen on Album Whale

How to: Adding a floating “Back to top” button in Pika

Update: Pika now lets Pro subscribers add custom code to the bottom of the <body> tag on every page of their site, meaning you can easily just copy-paste the code Pika uses itself for its own floating “Back to top” button and it should Just Work™. Here it is:

<div class="scroll-to-top-button">
  <button type="button" class="button button-S button-round" data-action="click->anchor-scroll#top" aria-label="Scroll to top">
    <i class="fa-regular fa-arrow-up" aria-hidden="true"></i>
  </button>
</div>

If we updates the code Pika uses for this button, this code here may stop working on your site, but I bet it won’t be difficult to redesign with custom css. Anyway, here’s the original post:

As we say repeatedly on its homepage, Pika is designed to help you focus on writing, not tinkering with your blog design. To that end Pika purposely doesn’t support complex liquid templating or other such code customization. However, today I thought I’d share how crazy powerful custom CSS can be in some circumstances where you want to augment Pika.

Pika has a “Scroll to top” button floating in the bottom right of the Dashboard. Some people have asked if they can have this on their own blog. This may or may not be a feature we build right into Pika one day, but in the meantime, you can get close to a full implementation yourself in Pika. Here’s how:

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Album Search in Album Whale

Did you know that we, Good Enough, make a little website called Album Whale where you can make beautiful lists of albums to share with your friends, the world, or just yourself? It’s true! We haven’t made an update there in quite some time (it’s pretty good enough as-is), but I was inspired this week.

Adding an album to a list previously required you to first grab an album share link from a music service of your choice (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, etc). This has always been a bit cumbersome.

I’m excited to share you can now just search for an album right away in Album Whale! Like this:

Gif of searching for an album in Album Whale

No need to first go somewhere else, you can jump right to Album Whale when you want to save an album to a list. I’ve found this really made my private “To Try” list more useful.

Behind-the-scenes we’re using MusicFetch, which supports most of the big music services. We aren’t sure, but there may be some albums that aren’t found via search? If so you can still paste in a link as you always could.

Introducing Letterbird 2.0

At the end of 2023, we built and launched Letterbird, a stupid simple free contact form for the web. We use it for all our own products (Pika example), and thousands of you are also using it for your own internet email forms. Thank you!

We feel pretty good that we could deliver software that does one thing good enough to be called #done and walk away, and in fact, we’ve barely touched Letterbird since launch. However, a backlog of improvement ideas has been growing, and with our team’s renewed focus, it was a good time to look at that list.

Leveling up is cool, so considering we went years without an update, we’re calling this Letterbird 2.0, why not:

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How We Configure Our Rails Local CI

Continuous integration is a great thing, and having tests and security checks run before every deploy is also a great thing. But if you’re a developer who has been shipping production code for more than a week, you definitely understand how much it can all feel like a house of cards that tumbles down nearly every day.

The Good Enough suite of products have been using GitHub Actions to make sure our automated test suites run before each deployment. The (mostly free) servers GitHub offers are predictably slow, with the Pika test suite generally taking close to ten minutes to run. (To that you say, “Delete most of your system tests!” Alas, due to Pika’s lovely editor, we unfortunately have to maintain quite a few system tests for the service.) Even when upgrading, and paying for, a higher-strength GitHub Action server we were seeing runs approaching eight minutes for Pika.

That’s already no fun, but even worse is the fact that our system tests were a bit flaky in the GitHub Actions environment. We eventually got the hint that running system tests in parallel just isn’t possible, but even running them one test at a time would lead to odd failures in part because of how slow things  move in the Actions environment. So imagine the cycle of trying to deploy a Pika update and needing to run continuous integration two, three, or four times. Frustration!

There’s got to be a better way!

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Good Enough Is Reorganizing

Hello reader, Matthew here. For those of you who’ve been on this journey with us since the early days, you might know the story of Good Enough’s inception. It was started by Shawn and Barry as a modest effort to realize some fun product ideas, with the lofty goal of seeing if we could make the web a little more interesting while making at least enough money to cover costs. They put together a small team (that’s when I joined), and we set out on a stormy year of prototyping and building and bad ideas.

Fast forward to today, and after much trial-and-error, a zine, a printer experiment, and many illustrations that became stickers, we’re thankful to have found some modest product successes in Jelly and Pika. What we’ve learned along the way is that, to properly care for all our products as they continue to grow, more individual focus is needed.

Internally, our team has been mostly split up for a while now, as different team members gravitated to different products. Starting next week, we’ll be making it more official and reorganizing Good Enough into separate entities:

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We’re Shutting Down Yay.Boo and Ponder

Update 12/03/2025: Yay.Boo is staying alive! 🙌 Keep your eyes peeled to Yay.Boo for updates.

We have built a lot of good products here at Good Enough. Whether you’re sharing an inbox with your team or avoiding social media with a blog, we’ve got you covered. Unfortunately, there are some products that, while very nice, have not had our attention for a long time. Two of those products are Yay.Boo and Ponder.

Ponder, our take on small forum software, was one of the first things we built as a collective. Even today, it works really well for a small group of polite folks to talk about a shared interest. Unfortunately, not many small groups found Ponder, and our team hasn’t had the bandwidth to continue improving the software.

Yay.Boo is a delightful tool with which to quickly throw some HTML online. On top of that, it has always been a playground to push the envelopes on just what a product homepage could look like. Unlike Ponder, Yay.Boo is even getting a decent amount of use.

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TIL: Rails, CloundFront CDN, and imgproxy

In September, I worked on improving Pika’s image performance. I’ve had a long career now (25 years 😭) doing mostly web-programming tasks, yet somehow I’ve never set up a CDN myself. I suppose the “management years” right as my prior organization was getting bigger contributed to missing out on that experience. In any case, the work was overdue on Pika and it was time to tackle it.

Through a bit of help from online articles and online friends, I’ve gotten it mostly figured out. Here is Pika’s setup.

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How LRUG uses Jelly to remove confusion and simplify organisation

The London Ruby User Group is one of the longest-running technology user groups in the world, having held a monthly meeting almost every single month since late 2006. It’s no small feat to have kept a local community running for so long, especially since everyone involved is a volunteer.

Jelly is the foundational tool that helps LRUG’s organisers keep things running smoothly.

The beating heart of LRUG is the mailing list, and the team regularly puts out a call for members to give presentations at the monthly LRUG meet-up. Those submissions are sent to an email address which forwards directly into Jelly.

Image

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You Need Customers to Succeed in Small Business

For your small business to survive, you need customers. Not just to buy once. You need them to come back, tell their friends, and trust you over time. And yet, too many small businesses make it weirdly hard to talk to them.

Well, duh, right?

I agree, yet I see small businesses fumbling this over and over. All the attention when discussing business is about giant corporations. Whether they’re selling servers or vehicles or every product under the sun, millions of dollars pass through their doors every day. Yet it is folly to apply the methodologies of giant companies to our small businesses. It sounds obvious, but I constantly see small businesses making it hard for customers to get in touch. If a customer does get through the “contact us” gauntlet, that small business often uses needlessly complicated enterprise software to talk with customers.

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James is Good Enough

James is Good Enough

We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re descending deeper, ever deeper, into the Q&A column introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Desperate to keep things interesting, James tried to spice up the interview format…

… OK ChatGPT, I want you to read my personal website and the Good Enough website, particularly the “<person> is Good Enough” posts, and the posts I’ve written there.

https://lazyatom.com
https://interblah.net
https://goodenough.us
https://goodenough.us/blog

Once you’ve done that, I want you to conduct a question-by-question interview with me, to form the basis of a “James is Good Enough” post. Ask me one question at a time, and then use my answer to evolve the interview. We should aim for about 8 questions in total.

Don’t be boring. Use the existing posts as inspiration, but I want the post about me to be unique. I’d be cool if it went in a strange tangent.

Absolutely! Let’s kick off this interview with a question that sets the tone:

Q1: If your inner monologue were a programming language, what would it be, and why?

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Barry is Good Enough

We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess…

Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?)
My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭

I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while.

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There’s no “A” or “I” in “Jelly”

The second half of 2024 was definitely an inflection point in the world of software. Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI started to permeate products everywhere, from chatbots to operating systems, and at times it felt like everyone was taking part in a race to integrate some AI feature or other into their product.

This seems to have been particularly true in the world of customer support. Whole businesses seem to have pivoted, turning AI into their central feature as if their very lives depended on it. Some taglines from well-known companies leave no doubt:

Image

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TIL: Tiptap Excerpt Extension with Rails

While building Pika’s Stream of posts layout, we had need to add the capability to manage excerpts in the Pika editor. These excerpts would be used to show a small portion of your post in a post stream while offering a “continue reading” link for readers to click to read the rest of your post. To add this capability we had to dig into extending the base open source library for our editor, Tiptap.

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You Complete Me

When Good Enough was in its infancy as a truly American LLC (formed in Delaware and representing one or two people who were only semi-serious about a business), it was fun to play around with building websites. Shawn and I were truly just playing and exploring, more than anything reminding ourselves that building software could be a satisfying activity. After a year of goofing around we were still enjoying it, but we were also running up against our limitations. Some things we were okay at, but many of our skills just weren’t that impressive.

So began the journey to Good Enough’s next phase: a collective of Good Enough people. We could make some cool, if janky, web toys alone, but with a few more people to play with…

Along came Lettini and Patrick and James and Cade. Each of us with a different set of skills and a different set of weaknesses.

Things definitely did become a lot more interesting once we teamed up! When my weaknesses got in the way, there was someone else to step into that gap and show me how it’s done. Hopefully others agree that I’m able to help them in some of the areas where I have a little more experience. 🤞

That’s enough reading for you; now it’s time to listen. Lettini, James, and I were recently asked to have a conversation on the IndieRails podcast. We are very thankful to Jeremy and Jess for this opportunity to talk about some of Good Enough’s short history. And luckily for you, we hardly talk about Rails at all!

Throughout our lovely discussion, the power of a team filled with complimentary skills kept resurfacing in my head. This experience cannot be recreated as a solo dev or by working on some project in my garage. The times where our skills don’t overlap makes this whole Good Enough experiment lovely and worthwhile. To my teammates, I thank you. You complete me!

Jerry Maguire saying 'You complete me.'

Jelly was #1 on Hacker News

Yesterday, Lettini took a chance and posted about Jelly on Hacker News, a discussion site notorious for it’s mercurial population of tech-maybe-too-saavy experts. Jelly is a tough sell for some of them, those with the technical skill to pipe email at a low level through custom-built filters running on their own cloud servers.

I’m not going to lie to you. I was pretty nervous.

And yet…

Jelly spread on top of the toast of tech

↑ Excerpt ↑

We got a really lovely response! It was also a great opportunity for us to practice talking about Jelly, about why we built it, what it stands for, and why people should consider it over other tools or workflows.

It gave us an opportunity to talk about our philosophy on pricing:

For us, affordability is part of the product itself.

We’re specifically building this not to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by “bigger” tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.

There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we’re not here to maximize profit.

This really resonated:

I love this. Seriously.

This is such a refreshing perspective! I’ve always wondered if there’s room for craftsmen to build quality products for smaller groups. Your focus on simple, well-designed software really resonates with me. Thanks for showing us a viable path.

A lot of people really got the product and the design choices we’ve been making:

I’m really liking the UX there! In sports-speak there’s the “Whose got the ball” method to identify who is managing a topic…and the way this is executed - from what i saw in the video - seems really straight-forward to help answer that.

I really like the way this landing page is designed. And I think it really highlights one of the sales points, which is that you are decent and reasonable. Good stuff. I’m going to send this around to some people.

Of course, there were plenty of people offering their home-brewed alternatives that cover some of what Jelly does, setting up filters and forwarding and even using labels to “claim” messages.

It’s fascinating to see how other people have approached this, and the existence of so many different “solutions” demonstrates, to me, that this is a problem that really exists in the world, and that really needs a Good Enough solution that works for people whether they are tech-saavy or not.

Anyway. Go try Jelly. It’s approved by the smart folks at Hacker News. What are you waiting for?

TIL: Overriding Permalink Generation in FriendlyId

FriendlyId is a helpful Ruby gem that streamlines creating permalinks and slugs for Rails applications. In Pika we’re using it to help with generating permalinks for blog posts and pages as well as slugs for tags. When a customer wrote in with a request to modify the behavior of these permalinks, I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to override the default behavior. Turns out it wasn’t too bad!

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