The Interledger Community 🌱: Teddy Story

Teddy Story — Grant Report #2 (final)

Alan Dent — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 11:13:38 +0000

Project Update

This is my final grant report, Teddy Story has come a long way since I started forever ago (October 2020).

At the start I was fully focussed on building a functional website, integrating web monetization, and getting the site live. The MVP went quietly live just before new year.

I then started working on building the customisation feature, where readers can put in their own names and genders of the main character and their teddy. That took me a lot longer than I anticipated (I struggled with React state), but I finally got it. Now there's a customisable version of Mars Teddy.

The second full story - Guardbot doesn't have a customisation option as it doesn't really fit with the story.

The next full stories - Cave Teddy, and The Bacteria Breeder, will have the customisation option.

I've experimented with a couple of different styles of extra content (100 + 20 model). In Mars Teddy I embellished the main story with inline bonus content. In Guardbot I tried to weave in a separate second story (which will probably become a full story at some point). I put the second storyline at the end of each chapter to try not to interrupt the flow of the main storyline too much.

Adding web monetized member content is easy. Working out the optimal place to put it seems to be the tricky part.

I originally intended to make the site multi-lingual during the grant period, but after a couple of unsuccessful attempts I decided to put it on the back-burner for the moment and focus more on producing content and marketing Teddy Story.

Progress on objectives

From Grant Report 1
Objective 1
Teddy Story public website available with no ads and some stories able to be customised.
Status: Completed

Objective 2
WebMon integrated into website, uses the 100 + 20 model
Status: Completed

Objective 3
TEDDYstory website account area to create profile that can customise stories
Status: Completed with variation
Reason for variation: to reduce complexity and cost I am just using local storage for customisation of the stories.

Objective 4
TEDDYstory website multi-lingual support
Status: Not complete
Reason for variation: I have had a couple of tries and each time I've stuffed it up and rolled back. I will keep working on this one as it's important to me, but will re-prioritise it to come after a site upgrade to Gatsby 3.

Key activities

Communications and marketing

Marketing has been where the majority of my effort has been expended the last few months. I've spent more time working on it than I have writing kids stories.

I'm reading and learning a lot about marketing Teddy Story, I suspect what I'm doing will have a pay off, but there's going to be a long lead time before I start seeing significant results. That's ok, so long as it doesn't consume all my time and I still get time to write stories.

Marketing budget. I used my marketing budget getting some logos/designs created. I wanted to spend it on things that could be re-used, which was why I went for logos. In the end I chose 3, one for the branding on the main site, one for use on stories for younger readers, and the final one for older readers. The main logo and the icon are now on the site and I'm updating the site colours to match the logo.

I used different designers for each, I wanted to share the grant money out as far as I could.

I'm getting more active on Linkedin, making sure I like and comment on all GftW posts that I can.

I've just begun to write some articles for Medium. I re-packaged my first Teddy Story blog on there, and am trying to get a couple of other articles I've written that mention grant for the web and web monetization into Medium publications. Publications are supposed to get more views.

I've also set up the shells of Facebook, Instagram, & Pinterest accounts for Teddy Story. These are low priority at the moment but will be ramping up Pinterest. I'm starting to put together a bit of a photo library to use for Pinterest and am going to add them to Teddy Story as well, because why just create something for someone else's platform?

I have a plan for a mailing list, but at the moment that's also low priority. I wouldn't want to produce a terrible one, so I'll leave it on the back burner until I can dedicate a bit more time to it.

This marketing lark is hard work - who knew? Ok, the entire world other than me knew, but I'm working on correcting that...

What’s next?

First and foremost - I'm still writing stories. I currently have 2 on the go (Cave Teddy and The Bacteria Breeder [that's a working title]), and at least half a dozen on my writing backlog. That's the the messy, not public backlog, not the clean public board :).

Coming a close second is marketing. I talked about that in the last section. I'm taking a content based marketing approach rather than spending money on advertising. I'll still be pushing web monetization and GftW everywhere I can!

There's the usual ongoing technical work on the website. I will get internationalisation working if it kills me, ditto upgrading to Gatsby 3.

Maintenance aside I have a couple of additional features (that will of course be web monetized) planned. The photo library I'm developing for marketing is going to get its own section of the site.

I'll also build a signup form for mailing list sign ups when it comes time to produce a mailing list.

I'd also like to build proper profile area for storing preferences, not just local storage. But that's currently the lowest priority.

What community support would benefit your project?

I put this report together over about a week, and that happened to be the week that Rafiki was announced. It sounds amazing - a massive leap forward in functionality.

I'm really excited to see what the community is going to do with that, and will be looking at any way I can integrate it into Teddy Story. Very much looking forward to reading a couple of how-to's :D

Additional comments

I just want to day a big thank you to the GftW team and the community. The grant has made a huge difference to my project. It's given me the means and the focus to push this project so much further forward than I would have if left to my own devices.

Relevant links/resources

Teddy Story
Customisable version of Mars Teddy
Teddy Story intro blog reposted on Medium
Medium article in Entrepreneur's Handbook that wraps in mentions of Grant for the Web and Web Monetization.

Teddy Story — Grant Report #1

Alan Dent — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 02:44:45 +0000

Hi - Alan here from Teddy Story, which, at one point late in the evening, I decided to write as TEDDYstory... because it was easier than spending hours messing around trying to create a logo.

Project Update

TEDDYstory is a website for publishing short stories for children. The stories are divided up so that they can be read in roughly ten minutes. If you've got WebMon enabled it's currently going to take you about 15 minutes to read aloud because I got a bit carried away in the extra content sections.

I've spent the last few months concentrating on getting the first version of the website up and running. It's built on Gatsby, using the Netlify CMS for a back end and deployed on Netlify. As the main (only) use case for the website is for adults to read to children, it has be simple and optimised for use on a mobile device. I've been mostly concentrating on getting that nailed.

I'm pretty happy with where that's at now, so the last week of December/first week of January has been spent whipping one of my stories into shape and doing the thousand fiddly detail bits that go into making the site live. You can see the result at https://www.teddy-story.com

The landing page and all the stories have extra WebMon content. I originally planned to use WebMon to suppress ads for subscribers, but the site doesn't have ads (and no plans to include any).

Progress on objectives

Tracking ok on objectives at the moment.

Objective 1
TEDDYstory public website available with ads and no customisation options
Status: Completed with variation

Variation Description/Reason

The website is available with no ads
Not strictly a customisation, but I introduced female/male versions of the stories for the public site.

Objective 2
WebMon integrated into website, removes ads and gives extra content (100 + 20 model)

Status: Completed with variation

Variation Description/Reason

No ads so can't use WebMon to remove them.

Objective 3
TEDDYstory website account area to create profile that can customise stories
Status: About to commence

Aim - to allow users to save profiles they can use to customise the stories, i.e. main character name/gender (options: female/male/neutral) and teddy name (teddy gender is always neutral).

Objective 4
TEDDYstory website multi-lingual support
Status: Not started

Aim - Offer the site in multiple language options.

Key activities

My project timeline and key activities have evolved a bit. I didn't realise it at the time, but I wrote the initial timeline like a waterfall project, ie all the work up front, release at the end.

As I got into it, this approach didn't feel right. Plus I hit a few snags getting to grips with Gatsby early on, so I juggled the work to make sure that an mvp of the website was released earlier.

The key activities for the second half of the grant are just down there in the What's Next section.

Communications and marketing

No action here yet - been busy working on having work to show to the public first :)

What’s next?

The activities for the second half of the grant are:

Develop and integrate a user profile area for the site. There is a lot to this, and I expect it to take a couple of months (elapsed time), all being well.
Continue writing stories/blogs for the site.
Develop multi-lingual support for the public parts (i.e. everything except the new user profile area) of the website.
Marketing & development planning
Nail down the finer details around copyright & licensing

What community support would benefit your project?

Is there a style guide for Grant for the Web? I found a couple of posts on the GftW forums that ended up pointing me to an image that I used on TEDDYstory, which was really helpful.

It'd be great if there was something more, and I just haven't found it yet (tbh I haven't looked that hard or in the last 2 weeks so something may have sprung up since then).

Anything covering consistent terminology, abbreviations, things like - is it acceptable to use monetisation rather than monetization if the language is UK English rather than US English. Those sort of boring pedantic details :)

I suspect I'll have some questions on copyright and licensing a little further down the track. I think I saw something on one of the forums about someone offering to assist with that, also just seen the post on the GftW for W3C so that looks really cool.

For the moment I've just put a copyright notice on the TEDDYstory footer, but plan on using the CC licenses for at least some of the content. One of those detail things that needs a little more thought than I was able to give it when I was trying to smash out my first release...

Additional comments

Thought I'd just share a few little WebMon things I did along the way that worked for TEDDYstory. I'll write these up a bit more fully in another post but here's a quick summary

Added a title prop to the WebMon component so that non WebMon users have some idea of what they're not able to see (but might consider subscribing for).
Styling to make the WebMon 100 + 20 components more obvious rather than just blending into the background.
Added the payment pointer into the story front matter and made editable in the CMS so that each story can have a different payment pointer. Not particularly useful when you're the only author, but maybe one day other authors might write on the site.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

TEDDYstory
TEDDYstory roadmap