Teddy Story — Grant Report #1

#grantreports

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.