Monthly update for January 2020
January 2020
Hi there!
This is the 28th full month that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Happy New Year!
Product updates
1. Changed font for ListenNotes.com. Previously I used a font that didn't work well with some non-English languages. As there are more and more non-English podcasts & non-English website visitors, I had to use a different font for better i18n.
2. Set up Crowdin for crowdsourced translations. If you want to help translate ListenNotes.com into your language (non-English), you can learn more here. Thank you!
3. Did some pixel tweaking for the website. In particular, I fixed some styling issues for iPad Pro!
4. Continued to improve Listen Notes for Chrome - the official Chrome extension of Listen Notes! Primarily some data cleaning work.
5. Added new data fields to API response data.
6. Added a few pages to increase visibility of some features of Listen Notes, e.g., Integrations, Help...
7. Did some a11y improvements for the website. Still far from perfect, but less awkward than before :) Hopefully Listen Notes can be more accessible to people with visual impairment, who use screen readers to browser the web -- 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision.
8. Set up more monitoring & alerting to further increase my confidence level of the stability of ListenNotes.com & API. By this point, Listen Notes already plays an important role in many people's jobs & businesses. It's okay that we don't have fancy product features (e.g., social features), but we have to make sure the service is super fast & always available 24/7!
Company updates
Earlier this year, I went to CES 2020 in Vegas! Saw a lot of interesting gadgets and met quite a few interesting people.
I'm thinking a lot about this lately: Podcasts are perfect informal learning materials. Basically you can learn any topics today just by listening to podcasts (mostly in English)! How can we get more people to listen to podcasts? Remember, the world population is close to 8 billion! But how many are regular podcast listeners?
Listen Notes helps make podcasts accessible to all people in the world via the website & api. Hopefully developers will use our API to bring podcasts to more computing devices other than smart phones, so podcasts can reach a bigger audience!
Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)