Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rLRNnlzIOQM

I connected with Vercel this past week to discuss how I could both optimize and try to control the costs that https://www.starterpacks.net was accumulating. I did walk away with some techniques that I will try on the next site I launch on Vercel where I need to try to maintain a consistent bill. Most notably:

• Fluid Compute is good and does reduce function use/chaos
• Controlling the cache key to maintain the cache between deploys (when possible)
• Play with Cache-Control headers to see if it's possible to increase the number of cached edge request hits, and ultimately skip the function rendering for each cached page

So, some good pointers to keep in mind for the next site that takes off on Vercel.

On the client front, it was a busy week, but I was able to play around with writing my own Cache Handler to support the Render deploy of the frontend. I played around with various approaches trying to write a Cache Handler backed by a Redis instance, but ultimately had to back out of that approach since I wasn’t able to fully grasp the life cycle flow for when a cache handler is initialized and abandoned, resulting in either too many Redis connections remaining open and overloading the instance, or clients cleaning themselves up too early and causing errors when get/set methods were called. Instead, I ended up writing a Cache Handler that is using a LRU cache, and it seems to be enough to smooth out the instance, serve things fast, but without all the complexity of the Redis stuff. I might circle back to a Redis-based solution down the road, but the LRU approach seems to be working for now.

After a long week of client work and troubleshooting, I wanted to make progress on something new that I have been putting off for a while, so I sat down on Friday on got the first instance of the open graph images renderer setup and deployed for https://www.opengraphs.com. OpenGraphs is essentially a re-write/re-imagination of a previous service that I wrote and was using to generate open graph images for my projects, but I have some plans to both optimize and expand that previous services vision, and hopefully customers, which I will be focusing on as I continue to build out the admin portions of the app.

Along with getting the OpenGraphs renderer deployed, I was able to publish an update to the library that I use to handle the open graph data in my NextJS sites. You can check it out here: https://github.com/ryanhefner/next-meta

And, don’t think that I have forgot about https://www.skylounge.social. After getting Starter Packs stabilized and no longer sucking money out of my wallet, and getting the OpenGraphs renderer setup and deployed, I should have the headspace available to wrap up a few of the remaining features on Skylounge and start inviting some early people to host sessions on the site and see how well it either does, or does not, work 🤞 More on that to come...

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Unfortunately I missed my milestone of getting an early release of https://www.skylounge.social deployed during Release Day. But, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. It’s kind of hard to run when it feels like you have a knife in your stomach and you don’t know how to stop the bleeding.

I dig into what attempts I made to optimize the NextJS App for https://www.starterpacks.net to utilize fewer resources on Vercel (spoiler alert, unsuccessfully), what the usage and costs were, and what I ultimately did to try to stabilize the costs until I can start to get the site earning more than it costs to host.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

A quick update on this glorious hump day, just in time before I head out to the Atlanta PHP meetup (https://phpxatl.com).

Tomorrow, May 21st at 11:30am EDT I’ll be chatting with Brian Casel (https://briancasel.com) about his recent launch of Instrumental Components (https://instrumental.dev). Join us in the stream and if you have any questions for Brian or myself you can get them answered live!

Subscribe and join the stream: https://youtube.com/live/LyMjPhkHk3k

I am also going to be streaming to https://stream.place, a new streaming platform geared towards the Bluesky/ATProto community. So it should be fun adding another destination to consume the stream from. And, I floated the idea out on LinkedIn to see if people would be interested in watching the stream there, but just waiting to see if I can get a good signal from there or not to justify adding it.

Weigh-in on the LinkedIn stream: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanhefner_jam-session-launching-instrumentaldev-activity-7331038582549147650-CmcP

So, with that said, hopefully you can find the stream wherever you prefer to consumer your streaming content and we look forward to seeing you there.

And, on the Starter Packs front, https://www.starterpacks.net, I ended up getting a pretty big hosting bill last month that would make the project unsustainable if it were that high moving forward, so in an attempt to reduce costs, and because I was meaning to explore it anyways to make navigating the site potentially faster, I converted all `/profile/...` pages to use ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration). My hope is that by rendering and caching these pages indefinitely, I will serve more cached versions of the pages and reduce some of the edge requests and function invocations previously required to serve those pages. It does introduce some complexity when it comes to revalidating those pages in the future, but this is just a means to try to cap costs, and if it works I can figure out how to keep everything fresh, while still being optimized. So stay tuned...

Other links:
https://www.skylounge.social
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhefner

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

I listened to a podcast episode back on January 30, 2025, and there are 3 little words that have been bouncing around in the back of my head ever since whenever I turn on the mic to stream or record, "oil your chair".

The podcast episode was from Justin Jackson (https://justinjackson.ca) and Jeremy Enns (https://jeremyenns.com) on their Podcasting Marketing Trends Explained (https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/podcast-marketing-trends-explained) podcast. Here’s a link to the specific episode:

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-10k-timeline-how-long-it-takes-to-reach-10k-dl-ep/id1725822754?i=1000651165287
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ojnaFU34BTMzAUEaJpLB9?si=75f58475b5824473
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbT9Z-glsrM&list=PLSbtUoUeEbPIsWA2_cM91SN3HJuUnEOz9&index=16

What's wild is that when I recorded this episode I had thought that it had only been a couple weeks since I had listened to that podcast episode, but it turns out it has been almost 4 months 😬, and it took me that long to oil my chair.

This episode digs into the little things that I (we) have a tendency of putting off. Things that you know exist, and could be easily addressed, but yet the task goes uncompleted, and consumes some of the cognitive space in the back of the head, throwing off wasted cycles whenever it resurfaces, instead of using those for things that really matter.

I’ll get back to sharing some project updates in the next episode, but just wanted to share a little thought piece about procrastination, or clearing the mind.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Some quick updates on the status of https://www.starterpacks.net and announcing the new project that I am working on!

Since the last update, the crawlers have been crawling—HEAVILY—accessing the site over 24M 👀 times. Needless to say, my Vercel bill is going to be a little higher this month, but 🤞 it will be worth it. Since the last update where the number of indexed pages jumped from 3k to 17k, since the last episode that number rose as high as 45k indexed pages, but recently dropped a bit to 34k.

I think the indexes is going to be a bit of a cat and mouse game, but my hope is that more indexed pages will generally be better for driving more organic traffic to the site. As the crawlers are crawling, I am working on some articles that will showcase some of the features, and also focus on some keywords that I am going to try to start ranking for. So, no new feature development for now, but going to see how traffic to the site goes over the next couple of weeks as I focus on SEO and content.

On the development front, new things are in full swing on a new project that is also focused on the Bluesky platform and community. The project called, Skylounge, and it can be found at https://www.skylounge.social. The goal is to build a X/Twitter Spaces alternative for Bluesky, that also embraces all the things I love about the open web.

Over the last week I have been streaming the development of the project, with the goal of sharing the process and approach that I am taking for the app, along with trying to multiply the return on my effort of building. So far it has been going pretty well, but I am really looking at these live streams as an opportunity to do some co-working with people, so if you have a project you are working on and want to share what you are doing during the live stream, I am down to share your work and even have you jump on the stream—if you want!

My goal is to launch the initial version of the site on Release Day, happening Friday, May 30. If you have something you have been working on—or putting off—maybe you want to use some social accountability to fuel getting it down. You can find out more about Release Day here: https://www.creativequests.world/releaseday

Ok, I have been rambling on. If Skylounge sounds interesting and you want to be one of the early people to sign-up and help me test it out, please go to the site and sign-up to be included on the mailing list I will be using to share updates: https://www.skylounge.social

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

You can also watch the video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/ENFM-pQK5iM

A quick update about some recent updates I pushed out on https://www.starterpacks.net. In the last episode, I announced the addition of the Quick Starter Pack Editor to the site. Since then, I have rolled out a few tweaks to make it nicer, like preventing duplicate entries to be added to new Starter Packs—even though those were never duplicated when saved to Bluesky—along with the ability to remove people from the list before saving. I have a few more updates planned around editors, namely being able to edit an existing Starter Pack, but that has not rolled out yet. I am sure I’ll be posting an update when it does.

Other than a few editor updates, the main updates that made there way to the site are in support of trying to help crawlers discover more content and pages on the site. Since January, the number of indexed pages in the Google Search Console has dropped from 980k+ down to just over 3,000 pages. In order to try to counteract the indexed page loss, I figured it was time to address some crawling issues that I introduced when I added infinite scrolling to the site. Now, in addition to supporting infinite scrolling when a user visits the site, there are links that crawlers can follow to continue discovering content and pages linked from those lists. At first when I tried to re-validate some of the issues via the Google Search Console, the number of indexed pages ended up dropping to just over 2,000 pages, but after a few tweaks and re-validating a few other issues that number has jumped up to over 17k pages, and based on the logs I am seeing from the site I am hoping that I can get back into the 6 digit+ range for indexed pages, which I am hoping will help to drive more organic traffic to the site.

In addition to the making the site updates, I am going to try to start posting more updates in the different communities to hopefully drive awareness, and also start building more backlinks back to the site. The first update was posted over on Indie Hackers, just announcing to project and enabling the profile so I can post more. You can read that one here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/starter-packs-is-born-fe2Z1KTOK7spuf84v0i7

There is a bunch of other stuff I should probably work on next for Starter Packs, but I think I need a new project to be able to ping-pong on when my interest wanes. Want to see what I plan on working on next? Subscribe to this channel, ⁨@ryan_hefner⁩, and I’ll be live streaming the development of it. And, if you have a project you’re working on that you would like to share, I welcome guests on the stream. Show off what you’re working on!

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

After a few weeks away I am back with some fresh updates that have been deployed to Starter Packs (https://www.starterpacks.net). The first—and best feature, imho—is the Quick Starter Pack Editor. This feature makes it easy to add people to your existing Bluesky Starter Packs in as little as 3 clicks (maybe more if you want to add them to multiple packs at the same time). This was a feature that I had wanted to add to the site since I started working on it, and I finally had the time—made the time—to sit down and build it out.

The next addition to the site is more for the curious, or the competitive, which is the Bluesky Starter Packs Leaderboards (https://www.starterpacks.net/leaderboard). Here you can find a list of the top Bluesky Starter Packs that people have joined Bluesky through either that week, or all-time. My hope is that these pages help to drive traffic to the site and encourage people to create and share more Starter Packs to try to climb the ranks.

I rolled out a few more features, but those were the main ones that made their way out. Now my focus is on building more value for the subscription plans and optimizing the site to appease the SEO gods so that more pages are indexed and available in search results. If you are interested in watching those updates come to life, I plan on live streaming those updates, so follow the channel (@ryan_hefner) and get notified when I go live.

To follow along, you can find me at https://www.ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com (https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhefner.com) and keep up with the show on https://www.allplay.fm and @allplay.fm (https://bsky.app/profile/allplay.fm).

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM (https://transistor.fm/?via=allplay)
Fathom Analytics (https://usefathom.com/ref/EKONBS)

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping #indiehackers

Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WNmupzrWcAA

What goes into setting and justifying your SaaS (Software as a Service) pricing? I had the goal of getting subscription plans setup for https://www.starterpacks.net before a queued job I had running to backfill data that I needed to support those plans was done processing. I ultimately did get the Stripe integration setup, along with defining the plans and everything that goes into supporting subscriptions on the site, but when it came to actually surfacing these plans publicly is where I got tripped up.

In this episode I dig into the plans, some of my thoughts around building value to justify the price, and some ideas I have to get to that value.

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplay.fm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

#buildinpublic #podcast #startups #webdevelopment #webdesign #bluesky #indiedev #bootstrapping