034 — Who’s ready to Jam!?

Hey. How's it going? I'm Ryan Hefner, this is the All Play podcast. So I wanna do a quick little episode and drop it in the middle of the week because there's just just some stuff going on. So first and foremost, I'm gonna be chatting with Brian Casel again.

He was actually on the last Jam Sessions episode that was recorded back in January, and that's when we were talking about, you know, our plans for the year and the stuff that we're gonna be working on and tried to make some commitments, to one another as far as, like, what we wanted to try to get out and launched over the next like three or six months. And so it's pretty cool. He's actually he launched, Instrumentl Components, which is at instrumental.dev. And I'm gonna be catching up with him as as far as like, you know, how he thinks the launch is going, everything that went into it, what you're gonna get. It's basically a starter kit plus kind of UI components and, you know, for for the rails world.

And, you know, he's he's he's trying to make it easy for everyone to just build really good, rails apps. And so it'll be fun to talk with him. I guess I'm gonna have to do a little reflection on myself as far as, like, what I've been able to achieve over that time. I did end up putting pricing on, starterpacks.net. I wouldn't say I officially launched it yet.

It is up and and out there, but, I don't think I've really kinda juiced it. So I got I assume I have to be real with myself on that front. But very cool. Excited to talk to him and catch up. And also wanna try to get some more jam sessions going.

So if you happen to be working on something that you'd like to talk about and share on the show, I'd love to hear from you. So just get in touch with me on Blue Sky or wherever, and we'll see where it goes. I'm also gonna play might play around with streaming this one. Well, both our new destination will be streamplace. So stream.place, which is basically a blue sky at proto at protocol, focused streaming service, which is cool.

So that's gonna be, streaming there tomorrow. And I don't know. I floated the idea on LinkedIn. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure if anyone's gonna comment on the the post I made, but who knows?

I don't know. Get weird. Try a LinkedIn stream or something. See how it does. Obviously, still will be on YouTube and Twitter, but gonna play around with a few other destinations.

And Twitch, actually. What the heck? These are just options. You throw them in there, you stream it out, see how it goes. As long as I got the bandwidth, guess we might as well use it.

Speaking of bandwidth, I also wanted to do a quick little update on starter packs. So yesterday, you know, in the back of my head, basically the site ended up racking up a kind of a crazy bill last month for the hosting. And, it's mostly, at least from what I can grok from the from the logs, it's mostly bot traffic. I think I'm actually gonna have to download those and do a little, like, user agent review and see where things are stacking up. But from what I can tell, it seems like these this the site is I maybe made it a little bit too crawlable, because it's being crawled by a lot of bots and it's costing, a pretty good chunk of change.

So one of the updates I ended up toying with yesterday that I ended up pushing out was I I noticed that the majority of the traffic seems to be focused on the profile pages. I updated those to where they are now using incremental static regeneration. So essentially, the first time that page is requested, a cached version is is generated, and then for every subsequent quest is gonna use that cached version. I'm not doing any revalidation at this point. I just want to see if this basically stops some of the kind of cost bleeding that is going in to hosting the app.

And then I also need to look into, like, maybe I need to tweak my robots file, to see if I should be, you know, limiting some of the bots. But at the same time, you know, I'm I'm seeing bots from, like, an Amazon bot. I'm seeing a chat GBT bot. Obviously, Google bot is crawling it. So I want those pages to be indexed.

So that's, like, the whole reason why I kind of did this, like, crawlable optimization to the site. So that way Google could find more pages because I was basically getting the most amount of traffic when I had the organic traffic. I guess I don't know if you call it organic, but the Google search traffic that was driving people to the site. So we'll see how that goes. Since rolling it out though, this is not the maybe the best sign.

It's already generated over 3,200,000 pages. So I've already blown through my, 2,000,000, rights, allotment for the subscription. So I need to do a little back of the napkin math to see if this is gonna be a cheaper solution. But I do think where that might help out is even though it's it's done 3,200,000 writes, a hundred as far as the the ISR reads, which is the, you know, anytime a a page is read after it's been written, those are at a 17,000. So I'm hoping, like, as more profiles kinda get written to and cached, then the reads will kinda go up and then balance it out.

And then I have those 10,000,000 reads, and maybe that will then reduce just like the number of edge requests and all that other stuff. But we'll see how it goes. Again, last year or last month, I had way too expensive of a hosting bell. I'm just gonna write it off as far as it being, you know, in the ultimate goal of getting the pay you know, the site, more indexed. But I think I'm gonna have to kinda tune things a little bit to keep it under, you know, like a reasonable threshold for, for what it where it's at right now.

Now, obviously, if I could get four or five sponsors on the site, that would obviously reduce the pain and, you know, make it justify kinda keeping it up. I am gonna be leaning into starter packs on for Sky Lounge, and I'm I'm as as the days go by, as I'm building Sky Lounge, I'm finding more and more potential opportunities of doing kind of, like, cross pollination as far as certain statuses being reflected on starterpacks.net, as well as being able to then have starter packs being displayed and linked to and associated with stuff that's going on at Sky Lounge. So I think that's still cool. I don't wanna obviously shut down a starter packs, but I definitely also don't want it to just be eating up more money than it's worth. So all that's good and we'll see where it goes from there.

That's about it. Gonna try to keep this one quick. Please join us tomorrow, 11:30AM Eastern Daylight Time. So wherever you're at in the world, you know, I hope you'll tune in. I'll have the the link to the YouTube video, in the in the show notes so you can, subscribe and get also get notified when that stream goes live.

I'll post updates as well if I end up choosing to also do a LinkedIn stream. I don't know. We'll see. I do see that you can actually kind of set an event and have that be a live stream. I'll set to make sure that that works with, like, Ecamm since I didn't initiate it through Ecamm.

Not really sure how that stuff kind of syncs up. You know? It's just kind of creating this stuff out there. And I don't know if it needs to really have, like, ID back to it to associate it to a specific event or anything like on LinkedIn. I know that it works for YouTube.

However it works, it's working. But, but we'll see. So, yeah, that's about it. Once again, I'm Ryan Hefner of the See All Play podcast. Join us tomorrow during discussion because we'll also be taking live q and a.

So wherever you're chatting, whether that's on X or Twitter or YouTube or Twitch, we'll get those in during the stream and we'll answer those questions. And I hope to see you there. So alright. Again, Ryan Hefner, All Play podcast. You can find episodes at allplay.fm.

And with that, have a great one. Later.