Update 10 for Open Makers

It has been a couple months since we last pushed out some big changes, I'm excited to share today our first set of updates to the site…

- Dark Mode
- Maker Tasks
- Email Notifications
- Maker Stats
- "I Need -> Maker Requests"
- Maker Requests Sidebar

Dark Mode Are you really a maker if your site doesn't have dark mode? Yes, yes you are. But we are still excited to share that we have finally pushed out dark mode for Maker profiles. When you are logged in, go to your manage profile page and in the sidebar there is a toggle to turn dark mode on and off, then just save your profile.

There are certainly more refinements coming for it, but we have a good start in place. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Maker Tasks This is a feature we have had planned for a long time, but have held back in respect for some other services that have a similar feature. However, we keep getting requests for a small, more "daily" update option beyond just large milestones so we are officially adding in Maker Tasks.

Maker Tasks allow you to post short progress updates on any of your products, you can use these to refresh your memory when you write your bigger milestone posts and want to give a consolidated larger update about your progress.

We do not have "streaks" for our tasks, we understand it may help with consistency in posting, but it also causes a lot of stress for people. They simply become constant "back of your mind" stressors that build up over time, plus, if you were to lose your streak, it becomes super depressing. So we simply aren't doing streaks, post when and as much as you want to.

Email Notifications Open Makers can sometimes feel a bit like a black hole, to solve this, we first introduced on-site notifications and now we are supplementing that with email notifications as well. You no longer have to come to the site to see if you have any interactions on your content.

To adjust your email notification settings, simply manage your profile, and select between "Immediate, Daily or Never" to adjust the flow of emails. By default it is set to Daily.

Maker Stats This is less of a feature and more of a "nice-to-know" element. If you go to your specific profile page, you will now see a new row directly under your main header information. We now display 6 different stats: Products, Milestones, Tasks, Articles, Followers and Profile Views.

This helps you see a high-level overview of how much you are actually pushing content through the site and how many people are finding you interesting enough to visit your profile. As we have always said, the more content you create, the more visibility you and your products receive in return. If you are truly eager to grow your business, sharing content is the easiest, most long-term solution.

Maker Requests This is actually a feature we already had, which was originally called "I Need", it was only displayed on your personal profile so it wasn't very visible despite being a very valuable tool to help get feedback and push out requests for things you need help with.

We updated the name of the feature and we also added a new sidebar panel to display the most recent Maker Requests to hopefully drive more collaboration and discovery.

Wrapping Up This is just the first set of new features and updates, we are working on the second set right now and hope to push those out as soon as possible. These next updates will help drive conversation and support for all Makers and their content. We'll share more about these updates soon.

Thanks for your ongoing support! :: Open Makers