Weekly Indie Log #13

Hirvesh Munogee

May 20, 2024

4 min read

Moving to Blended Marketing/Coding Days
Blog Stying Using Custom CSS
Improved Blog Header
Wrapping Up
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Weekly Indie Log #13. Last week was meant to be coding week but I got hit by sickness (fever, cold) early last week. This threw off my coding week as well as broke my gym streak which I had going on for 12 consecutive weeks.

While this was a downer, the goal is always to bounce back stronger. Time-off from the indie world has given me some time to think about the whole marketing/coding week cycle which I embarked on more than a month ago.

While it is a really good idea, it’s slowing me down considerably in terms of shipping velocity and for the roadmap I have planned for both stomod.com and assistflare.com.

Moving to Blended Marketing/Coding Days

The way I work right now is I have a big chunk of 3 to 4 hours early morning where I do deep work and then later in the afternoon after my day job, I do some free hours where I do other operational tasks.

What I am think to move towards is to do the coding part of my indie journey in the early morning hours and switch to marketing mode in the afternoons.

The idea is to ship something every day in the morning and then spend time in the afternoon marketing the products, rinse and repeat daily.

Now even though I was sick, I managed to find some time to ship some thing which were requested previously by customers.

Blog Stying Using Custom CSS

One of the requested features by customers of Stomod was to allow for styling of different blog layout elements using CSS.

While Stomod did provide a Custom Code functionality, it did not provide static CSS classes bound to each layout element, for e.g. header, logo, table of contents, etc. for the users to be able to apply targeted CSS to.

With this update, I decided to address this and combed through the layout and added the CSS classes to every element which was deemed as something which would want to be styled by users.

I went the extra mile as well and include an auto-complete functionality in the code editor (which was implemented specially for this) to suggest those static CSS classes to ease the life of users.

This is how it looks like:

Improved Blog Header

The blog header has been the source of some headache for quite some time for me. If you have ever worked on developing one which needs to accommodate different logo sizes, dynamic menu items, etc. you will know that managing all of this while keeping the header to look consistently good and responsive is no mean feat.

With that in mind, I set out to build a progressively responsive header which scales well with no matter the number of menu items and logo sizes.

The idea was to show as many menu items as possible within the space available in the menu and wrap items which do not fit under a drawer menu behind a hamburger icon.

After some insane code-fu, I managed to get the implementation down and this is now it looks transitioning from a large desktop screen to mobile:

Wrapping Up

Besides the above, I also shipped a truck-load of bug fixes and UI improvements on the blog side and aim to continue improving the blog layouts and provide alternative themes for users in the upcoming few weeks.

For now that’s it, cheers!

Hirvesh Munogee

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Hirvesh is an indie hacker from the beautiful island of Mauritius currently working on his two SaaS products: stomod.com and assistflare.com

He’s passionate about solopreneurship and blogs at hirve.sh about his learnings on setting up a business!