Updates since "the restart"

This first email deals with more history than future emails will, so it’s a bit long 😅. If you just want to know what’s coming up in the future feel free to skip to the bottom!

The goal with Shera.no is quite simple. Let’s have somewhere to keep information about an event, so you don’t need to scroll back up in a chat to find a meeting time, or send an message to ask what an address was. All you’d really need is some sort of page with information, and a URL to share with your friends.

This was my thesis in the first era of Shera (from about winter 2022 to winter 2023). I made the basic tool and tried to keep it as light as possible. But there was a major problem with my assumptions.

Say I invite you to my birthday party. I send you a handy link that has all the info you need. 2 weeks later you’re getting ready to head to my place, and big shocker to no-one not named Aslak, you’ve forgotten what that damn link was. You might remember Shera, but unless you are lucky with your browser history you won’t find the full link. In the end you still have to scroll back up in the chat to find the get the info you need.

📝 Mandatory sign-in to attend events

Before you did not need an account to attend an event. If you did I’d show you your events whenever you logged in, but people using Shera for the first time didn’t know this, so most skipped signing up.

I really liked not having to make an account to attend, but Shera didn’t work if you had to remember some random URL. So, now you have to sign in to attend. It’s a bit sad, but at least it’s quick and easy, and it does allow me to build more useful features in the future.

🔔 Reminders

Now that you can find the event just by visiting Shera.no we need to make you remember that the event was hosted on Shera in the first place. Sending you an email right before you’re going to some event seems like a really good idea!

So I made email reminders. There’s plenty left to do, like making them look nice and having different reminders for going / maybe / invited, but we got the basics working.

📧 Email invitations

It’s always been a goal to make better ways of inviting friends. Link sharing is a very flexible way of inviting people to Shera events. No matter what social network you use, you have some sort of text chat where you can send a link. However, it is a far cry from the convenience of the invites in facebook events.

Email invites aren’t amazingly useful on their own, but I had just done the work on setting up emails and it was nice to do some of the thinking on the invites concept. So now you can invite people by email, and as a nice side-effect you can invite a lot of people by comma-separated emails.

⏭️ Up next?

While I don’t have access to facebooks massive network of all your friends, there is an implicit network being formed by who you’ve attended events with in the past.

I’ve been a bit stuck on what I should call this feature. I’ve considered network, friends, or mutuals but I haven’t been able to land on anything. What do you think I should call it? I would love it you reply to this and let me know, or if you have any other ideas for ways to solve invites. (It’ll also help the email gods understand I’m a real person, so any reply is appreciated 😅🤖)

That’s it for now, hopefully you’ll get a new, shorter, email from me in a couple of weeks.

Cheers!

Aslak