Hello everyone!

As I shared in advance in a previous Journaly TL;DR Weekly post, things have been a bit quiet as we have been working hard on building Direct Messaging - which is just so, so, so exciting. However, as promised, I've still been working on some smaller updates in the meantime, and have completed a small collection of them which I thought I'd share with you today. One of them is actually quite significant!

1. Email Notification Configuration - FINALLY!

That's right, you finally have the ability to configure how you receive email notifications, which for now just means the Daily Digest Email. In the future we will also have another really nice email that let's you know about a small handful of posts that need feedback and match your native or advanced languages, with the goal of helping everyone get feedback. This could be especially helpful for less common languages where we might actually have some native speakers who simply don't log into Journaly very often, but maybe they would if they knew there was a fellow Journaler who needed their help.

So I wanted to make sure we build the ability to configure your notification preferences before we create that. At the moment you simply have the ability to switch the Digest Email to 'daily' or 'off. In the future, I plan to also include a 'weekly' option in case you want to receive it just once per week.

To update your preferences, simply go to https://journaly.com/settings/account > Notifications.

Also note that the "UI Language" setting has moved to that page which makes more sense.

2. Journaly Editor Bugs FIXED

Building an editor is really hard. Some of you may know that one of our biggest bug challenges has been that languages using composed characters, such as accents (é) or 我, would experience problems on certain devices/Operating Systems/browsers. More and more of these cases have been slowly fixed over time, but I'm very excited to share that all of the remaining cases we are aware of appear to now be fixed! 🎉 There was also an issue with spell-check on Android devices which is also fixed! Wow... I know we still have a few bugs left to fix, but there really are very few now compared to where we started and what a journey it has been to get to this point.

3. Small Style Improvements

You might have noticed that the comment input text box has had a minor styling makeover. Previously it was just a white area of the commenting UI and a little hard to see, wasn't well separated from the existing comments, and looked a little bit less polished than the rest of the UI. It's a small change, but I think it looks nicer now ☺️

4. Landing Page Improvements

I have updated the little "Feature Table" that shows all the existing and upcoming features for both Free & Premium, which was previously only visible within the https://journaly.com/settings/subscription page, to include more features. I also now added this to the Journaly landing page so that people visiting for the first time can actually see what features we offer before signing up!

5. Language Names Are Now in English

You may have noticed this one – for a long time we displayed the language names within selection dropdowns as their Endonym, the "native" word for the language in that language. So français for French and 日本語 for Japanese. One problem here was that we were still collecting these endonyms for the language list, and I wanted to be very careful about getting them right, which wasn't always easy. The other problem is that, well, one of the cool things about Journaly is that we support SO many languages, including endangered and constructed languages. However, most people would have no idea what most of those languages actually were since the endonyms are often completely different to the English name, for example.

So now, they are all nice and consistent in English. In the future, the goal will be to display them in whatever your UI language is set to, but this will be a big project in itself.

6. New U.I. Language: Brazilian Portuguese!

We now have support for Brazilian Portuguese as a UI language! In case you aren't familiar, we now support seven UI languages, which means you can view the Journaly interface in any of those languages. There are a few gaps in the translations for some languages that we are working on filling in. We would love to also add European Portuguese to the list, Spanish is currently very incomplete and needs some help, and of course we would like to add other languages too!

7. Behind-The-Scenes But Very Important

This one is something that probably only Software Developers will be able to fully appreciate (especially those who have been in charge of maintaining an entire application/system), but over the last 6 months or so we've completed a lot of "dependency updates", including some very tricky ones. Basically, a piece of software is typically composed of code written by the developers as well as many other "packages" or "libraries" written by other developers. Those other packages are usually always being updated, and sometimes those updates can involve significant changes that require re-writing a lot of code on our side in order to update.

Compared to most products of our size, Journaly actually has very few dependencies and I have chosen to build a lot of things from scratch – including entire products/systems we use internally so that we aren't dependent on expensive, third-party products and services. This is a big part of why Journaly is much cheaper to run, and why I've been able to keep the platform alive with my own money so far.

But we do still have plenty of these dependencies, like any application, and we have spent a pretty enormous amount of time getting them updated and keeping the codebase healthy.

That's all!

Wow, now that I write all of these out, I see that we've actually gotten quite a lot of things done while working on the Direct Messaging system! 😅 I hope you found one or two updates in here that were interesting/exciting to you 😊

Happy Journaling and I'll now get back to those DMs and YouTube videos I've been working on!