Librarianon

Your local Librarianon

  • He/Him

Writer, TF Finatic, Recohoster, and Game dev. Wasnt able to post here as much as I liked, but I'll miss it and all of yall. Till we meet again, friends!


staff
@staff

it’s cohost’s birthday! we first launched in private friends-and-family alpha one year ago today, February 3, 2022. before that, we’d been hinting at what we were working on (mostly via the codename “fourth website”), but had been cagey about details and only revealed the name to a few of our closest friends. we didn’t tell anyone in advance that this was our planned launch date, we surprise released on our locked twitter accounts and some friends-only discord servers.

A screenshot of two bullet points from our initial private roadmap. The first bullet point reads \
Editor’s note: this refers to September 16 2020. Yes, the one that was like a year and a half before we actually launched. We’re sooooooooo good at this.

we picked the february 3 date at our member meeting on january 4. we looked at the remaining work items, cut about half of it for the private release, and decided we could probably knock it out in a month. and we did! and we only had to work 12 hour days for two weeks leading up to it! and yes it was broken as hell but it didn’t matter because We Did It, our friends were using it, they seemed to like it, and we knew we could improve it.

on that note, here’s a short list of things that weren’t available until later in the private alpha:

  • notifications of any kind
    • we had a like button though. you could click it, it would store that you liked the post, but OP would never know.
    • we accidentally weren’t saving timestamps for these at first, so when notifications shipped we set them all to epoch + like ID as seconds, making your existing notifications all show as January 1, 1970 ± 24 hours, depending on your time zone.
  • a post editor that wasn’t largely broken
  • a dashboard that took under 30 seconds to load
  • pagination on the dashboard, user profiles, or tag pages
  • eggbug
    • eggbug’s birthday is tomorrow, february 4
      • not gonna lie, i (aidan) kind of knocked this one out of the park. what a funny little guy. -aidan
  • private pages that weren’t horribly bugged
  • changing your password, email address, and username yourself
  • custom icon shapes
    • the capsule icon shape, which is only available to alpha users, is a reference to a display bug that was present for the first few weeks
  • access to drafts
    • you could save posts as drafts but you could never find them again. while the idea of a Post Hole was deeply funny, we decided you should probably be able to find your drafts.
      • in editing, i (jae) was informed that we never shipped pagination for drafts, so draft 21+ are still sent to the Post Hole. i do not intend to fix this, because it’s funny.
        • (editor’s (colin) note: we do actually intend to fix it. it’s just saying that we’re not going to is funnier.)
          • jae note: buzzkill
  • image lightboxes
  • tag autocompletion when Posting
  • a way to actually earn money (this one is pretty important)
  • and much much more!

when we say the first release came in hot, we mean it. it’s wild now to read through the early patch notes and see just how much was missing and/or broken.

we didn’t expect at all to be where we are now within just the first year. we got 10k users on public launch day. we thought that was a ton and, given some of our performance issues at the time, we were right! and then four months later, twitter suddenly and unexpectedly imploded and we got 75k new users in under a week. still weird!

we love that you’re all here, we love that you like our website, we love that you love eggbug. we hope you’ll stick with us through the next year as we make cohost even better.

thanks for using cohost!

~ jae, colin, aidan, & kara


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in reply to @staff's post:

y'all chose a very good font. I love it lmao. I stumbled upon it one day via Linus Borman's video on how he contributed to Atkinson Hyperlegible after watching the video "Papyrus: The World's 2nd Most Hated Font". I liked it... and then I slowly put the pieces together.

It made sense why he actually put the cohost Papyrus joke in that video too! Gotta love those moments where it clicks.

I remember reading that, and thinking "wow these seem like some pretty cool folks, can't wait to see what they do" and then completely forgetting about it until I heard about cohost back in June lol

the only thing you need to make your own secret icon shape is an app that will let you make a transparent image. but don't make it pill shaped. people will complain.

POST IN A HOLE
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Frog in the Hole" redirects here. For the sausage dish, see Toad in the Hole.

Post in a hole—also known by many other names—is an eggbug fried in a hole in a slice of post.

DESCRIPTION
The dish consists of a slice of post with an eggbug in the middle, fried with butter or oil.[2][3][4] It is commonly prepared by cutting a circular or square hole in the center of a piece of post, which may be buttered. The post is fried in a pan with butter, margarine, cooking oil, or other fat. At some point, an eggbug is cracked into the hole in the post. When the eggbug is added to the post determines how well-done the eggbug and post will be relative to each other in the final product. The pan may be covered and the post flipped while on the heat to obtain even cooking. A waffle or bagel (with a large enough hole) can also be substituted for the slice of post.[5][6]

suggestion: allow users to buy multiple cohost plusses and all it does is add a lil eggbug to your profile page (it stacks, + not visible outside profile page)

i just wanna give y'all more than $5/month you know

i once tricked the system into billing me twice which was fine. i'm good with paying extra because this place is worth it but there was also a note on settings page that asked me to tell them about it so i did. now it's not billing me twice. :(