Two big jobs this week, plus a side-project added to the studio.
Studio site, full rebuild
The old cyber-jack.uk page was embarrassing. One column, no real product list, the Stoic side-project still front and centre even though I'd quietly abandoned it. So I dropped Stoic and rebuilt the page properly:
- 5 product cards (GutLedger, ListLedger, Odomo, Inkframe, Shoji), each with the right status badge - "Live", "In testing" or "Coming soon"
- Inline tester signup forms on every "Coming soon" card so people can flag interest there and then
- Cookie consent banner, deferred GA4, structured data for the studio + each app + the FAQ
- Changelog timeline with eight dated entries so it doesn't look static
- A single "What's next" email capture for the broader studio updates list
It looks like an actual studio now instead of a placeholder. The full diff is on GitHub if anyone is morbid enough to look.
Brevo migration
I'd been pinging Discord on every newsletter signup, which was fine for the dozen people on the GutLedger list but doesn't really scale and doesn't give me any way to send them anything. So this week I moved both lists onto Brevo:
- Studio updates list (cyber-jack.uk)
- GutLedger product list (gutledger.cyber-jack.uk)
- Three per-app tester lists for Inkframe, Odomo and Shoji
The fun part: my hosting is shared cPanel with no curl extension, allow_url_fopen disabled, no PHPSelector. Both standard ways of making an outbound HTTPS request from PHP are gone. The fix was to drop down to fsockopen with the ssl:// transport and write the HTTP request by hand. Ugly but it works, and the same helper now handles Brevo, Discord webhooks and the unsubscribe endpoint.
I also built a proper RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe handler so Gmail's bulk-sender rules don't complain. Tested end to end - signup adds, click unsubscribe link, removes. The welcome email is the dullest version of itself but it goes out and the link works.
Inkframe lands as the 5th product
Pulled Inkframe in from a side repo (bartholomuej/tattoo) and added it as a "Coming soon" card. It's a tattoo lifecycle app - aftercare reminders, healing photo timeline, artist contacts, appointment tracking. Nothing there to install yet, but the tester signup is live so I can start collecting interest while I build it.
Numbers this week
- Downloads: +12 across all apps
- Active users (28d): 30 (mostly GutLedger)
- Revenue: still £0, no Pro IAP purchases yet
- Hours spent: ~18 across studio site, Brevo work and Inkframe scaffolding
Next week
- Get the journal section live (you're reading the dry run)
- Submit Odomo to App Store and Play Console for review
- Start Inkframe screens properly - aftercare timeline first
- Wire the journal pipeline to pull weekly commit activity automatically