March was a busy month for me personally, but I was still able to make some big changes to RoutineHub. This month was spent tweaking the advertising on the site and gearing up for moderation and preview media.

My foray into first-party ethical advertising has been a fun and interesting journey. The ads seemed to do well, but I'm still figuring out the best way to get advertisers. Right now it's a lot of work getting advertisers, but hopefully that will slowly change over time.

A very big and positive change was removing downvotes entirely and replacing upvotes with hearts. It's created a more positive feedback loop between authors and users.

Other big changes included Submission Rules and the NSFW setting. These are huge steps forward for content moderation and making sure users are kept safe when browsing and downloading Shortcuts.

As always, you can see all of the changes on the changelog page

Finances

I did alright in the way of advertising. I'm hoping to increase that revenue in April. With the ad revenue being close to $180, I'll be donating $18 to the Django Foundation in April! I can't wait for that amount to grow.

I tried some ads with Twitter. It was an awful experience and I probably won't do it again. Mainly just because the money disappeared almost instantly. I also tested out Bing Ads. I had much better results with Bing Ads. They were great and contacted me to help me refine my ads better, which helped me not waste too much money. I haven't decided if I'll continue advertising or not.

I finally bought Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. I had some extra funds and decided it was finally time to support the software I use to build my projects. I highly recommend both products. They have become indispensable to me.

Below is the table of what came in and what came out of the bank account.

                | Credit | Debit 
----------------|--------|--------
Advertising     | $179.75|
Memberships     |  $17.61|
Bing Ads        |        |  $45.00
Twitter Ads     |        |  $10.00
Hosting         |        |  $28.77
Sublime Text    |        |  $80.00
Sublime Merge   |        |  $75.00
Fancybox License|        |  $29.00
----------------|--------|--------
Totals          | $197.36| $267.77
Difference      |        | -$70.41

Now I know I spent more than I earned, but there was already money in the bank account to afford that. I'm still at a net gain this year :)

What's coming in April

April showers bring May flowers.

April will bring new moderators and moderation tools for them to start bringing the hammer down on Shortcuts that don't adhere to the submission rules. Hopefully that means that in May all existing shortcuts will be sifted through and we'll be able to maintain order a bit better.

I'm also hoping to finally migrate the site to Digital Ocean. This has been a long time coming as my current host keeps complaining that I'm using too much resources. There are just too many features to ship and bugs to fix!

Finally, I'm really hoping to have shortcut media completed by the end of April. That means you'll be able to upload screenshots and preview videos for your shortcut instead of having to link to YouTube videos or directly embedding the images in the description.

Here's to the future!