Sprint 27 – Vogue, Strike a Pose

Hello girls, boys and cabbages! 

How are you? 

I’ve had a great two weeks working on SoSa, it’s been very productive! and not only have I finally finished the refactor Saga i’ve actually managed to build some features!

Happy 7th Birthday!

7 years ago Saturday, in 2014. One late Thursday evening – I launched a little chat platform called Social Savanna (SoSa)

Chugging away on a little $100 a month server, In 24 hours, we had 15,000 signups, 282 of which identified as a Pizza Roll!,

Chat rooms filled with 100s of people spending hours a day talking complete and utter nonsense.

SoSa was originally for the Imgur community, a drunken whim one lonely Christmas that I built over a couple of months thinking it would achieve nothing and be dead within a year.

Little did I know how much impact it would have on mine and others lives! People made friends, met loved ones, some even got married because of it.

Sure, it was never going to win any design awards, it was a little broken, and the whole idea had no real direction or quality control but it was my baby and the hardest thing I ever had to do was shut it down in 2018.

But as I rebuild it, as I give it purpose, direction and make it the thing the original community want and I believe the world desperately needs I’m proud to say it’s our 7th Birthday today!

So happy birthday SoSa! and here’s to hoping this year you’ll rise from the ashes again!  

Alpha Release 1.1.2

Wow almost 2 months since the last release! that’s crazy. Obviously we had Christmas, My Birthday, work getting in the way and general laziness in between but still!

This is the first release of 2021!

Most of the work done for this release was a major refactor of the app code, which if you’ve been following my previous updates you’ll know how much work has gone into that.

However there are still other changes which are showcased below!

Lore / Story

I’d like to welcome our new writer Sara! 

Almost by chance just as I was starting to look for a new writer, Sara popped up in the INAT subreddit looking to get involved in game writing projects so I reached out!

Sara is a professional journalist, and a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons. Sara has had articles published by the Gaming Bible, Tabletop Gaming, The Guardian and Dicebreaker among others.

What i’m doing with SoSa is a bit weird, it’s not your usual game writing project but being only two weeks into working together Sara’s passion and professionalism has really shined through and has enabled me to start engaging designers already to visualise the universe we’re building.

Designs

We’re making real progress with the website designs, I’ve intentionally kept everyone in the dark about what the final product looks like but now we’re moving forward I wanted to share the very first mocks the fantastic Federica came up with.

Keep in mind these are the very original drafts from  back in December.

What’s showing here is a community page (rather than the chat rooms that will be the prominent area) and we were playing with a few different ideas to find a mix that might work.

Again, please remember this is a few months old now and the design has progressed significantly from this (to the point that the work i’ve done this sprint is actually based on the current designs)

Profiles

Now that clean up is complete, i’ve managed to get a lot of time the last few days to work on our Profile system, this includes the backend and app!

Everything you see is pulled from the database, nickname, profile picture, cover picture, age, gender, location, even the about me!

As well as this popup, everywhere that my username appears now has the correctly uploaded profile picture and nickname in the database (which is different from my username)

You can also access the profile from any screen that your face appears and if we don’t have the profile in the database OR a user has blocked your access to their profile depending on context it’ll either not show OR show as anonymous with a generic profile picture.

I’ve also added the backend capability for statuses, custom statuses (allowing you to add your own status names) and community level custom statuses (so if default is active, idle etc – a community can specify their own default for people inside the community)

Also also, I’ve added the old genders back into the database. Being inclusive but also keeping some of the sillier ones we had on the original SoSa

Game night

Next SoSa game night we will be doing another Minecraft Build competition!

Sunday 21st March 1900-2100 GMT / 1200-1400 PT / 1500-1700 ET

Wow was the last build competition October?!!? Crazy!
I still can’t get those spooky houses out of my head, especially Hodors incredible Halloween themed house!

So this time, with easter just a few weeks away, we decided it’d be fun to do an Easter themed Minecraft build! 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sosa-gamenight-minecraft-build-competition-tickets-143736506761

Don’t have it? Don’t worry!

If you’re going to get involved and want a copy, Give me a shout and i’ll buy you a copy 🙂

Stats

LinkedIn grew from 878 to 880
Patreon, We stayed steady at 16! 
Our Beta List grew from 404 to 404 (yeh it stayed the same)

This sprint our Average position has tanked! going from 21.7 to 25.1!

Impressions are down 3.64k to 3.08k and Click through is down again slightly from 2.6% to 2.5!

Domain authority is holding steady at 28!