To all my beloved Journalers, today is a very special day – Journaly has two separate birthdays!

Some of you may remember that on this day, one year ago, I announced the public launch of Journaly and, wow, what a year it has been! It's also exactly four years since I first started creating this platform – a journey that has completely altered my life in ways I could never have imagined. I wanted to write a special post to celebrate the platform's first official birthday with all of you because it's all of you who have made every moment of the last four years worth it.

2021 @ Journaly In Review

To be honest, we've made so many improvements to the platform – from entire systems to the tiniest enhancements – it would take me hours to go through and list them all. But let's take a look at the highlights!

Emails & Notifications

• Daily Digest Email: Versions 2 & 3 with batching (remember that first week when you would receive an email for every comment? 🙈 We sent about 20,000)
• In-App Notifications: We built an entire, multi-level notifications system

Translations

• The Journaly U.I. is now available in German and (both simplified & traditional) Mandarin Chinese, with Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese all partially complete and coming soon!

Journaly Premium

• Built out the entire subscription payments infrastructure
• Built Four Premium Features: Inline Post Images, Post Bumping, Private Share Links, Save Posts To Your Collection
• Conducted User Research and dropped the price from £12/month or £100/year all the way down to just £5/month or £42/year based on your feedback!
• Added a Student Discount at just £15/year!

Journaly Editor

• Support for hyperlinks and tables
• FINALLY most of the bugs that were destroying the experience for users on certain Operating Systems and/or Browsers are FIXED!
• We literally re-built a 3rd-party service (Cloudinary) internally for handling all your image uploads, saving us almost $100/month in bills (much, much more long term)!

Profile

• Activity Statistics!
• A whole series of visual bug fixes & improvements
• Support adding your location and interests

Post Filtering

• Text Search & Topic Filtering
• Filter Actions/Shortcuts: "my languages", "followed journalers", "needs feedback", "commented posts"

Posts & Feedback

• Clapping for posts
• Markdown support in comments
• Showing commenter language level
• Massive performance improvements & general improvements to opening new threads
• More default post images

One Last Feature For 2021

We actually have a whole variety of things that are already complete and just awaiting code review or final changes, but I wanted to get one last thing out today no matter what: Journaly Tutorials!

That's right! There's now a single place that all users can go to learn how to do anything you could want on Journaly. It can be found within your settings navigation under "Tutorials" (here) and contains an entire series of short-and-sweet tutorials to make it as easy as possible to find the specific answers you might be looking for. I apologize that the first version that is up now doesn't quite have my usual high-quality audio and general editing style, but I'll be updating them one by one in the new year and will also continually add new ones or re-make certain chapters as the features get improved.

Some Final Thoughts

Seriously everyone, thank you all so much for being here and for supporting both me and Journaly. I have always truly meant it when I have said that above all else, I just want to build a platform that truly and genuinely brings value to the lives of people learning languages and building community. I just want to build genuinely superb software that delivers a delightful, intuitive, minimalistic yet complete experience, and I want the core features that help people learn and come together to be accessible to all people in the world with an internet connection.

So while Journaly is a business and I would love for it to one day provide an income – as long as I can find ways to keep the lights on, just seeing the community and platform bustling with life, activity, new friendships and meaningful connections, mountains of substantive and heartfelt posts and feedback... that's always going to be the most important thing for me and it has made an otherwise extremely difficult year for me on every level, truly special and one that I'll never forget.

Thank you for making Journaly's first year of life out in that big old world bigger and better than I could have ever dreamed of.

Wishing all of you the most amazing 2022 🎈