Dabble Me helps people remember what's happened in their life. Use it as a light-weight journal on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis...it's up to you! Dabble Me will email you on a time & days you choose - you simply reply to the email to post entries. The app is live at https://dabble.me.
This app utilizes the following 3rd party services:
- CloudFlare manages DNS + free SSL support (free for basic service)
- SendGrid for Sending & Receiving Email (free for 200 emails per day)
- Filepicker for Photo Uploads & Storage (free for 500 uploads per month)
- MailChimp for sending updates to all users (free for 2000 subscribers)
- Google Analytics for traffic stats (free for standard analytics)
I recommend forking and setting up a server at Heroku. You can generate a free SSL certificate at StartSSL.
You will need to setup SendGrid to receive incoming emails and point them to your app to parse. Visit this Settings Page; add your hostname of post.yourdomain.com and point the URL to https://yourdomain.com/email_processor. I have spam check turned off, since that hasn't been an issue yet. Make sure you setup an MX record for the post.yourdomain.com subdomain that points to mx.sendgrid.net.
In order to turn on scheduled emails in Heroku, you'll need to add an hourly job using the Heroku Scheduler.
rake entry:send_hourly_entries
Your local environment variables at config/local_env.yml will need to be something like this:
MAIN_DOMAIN: yourdomain.com
SECRET_KEY_BASE: 1234..1234
DEVISE_SECRET_KEY: 1234..1234
SMTP_DOMAIN: post.yourdomain.com
SENDGRID_USERNAME: your_sendgrid_username
SENDGRID_PASSWORD: your_sendgrid_password
MAILCHIMP_API_KEY: f....3333-ek3
MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID: 9982...112
FILEPICKER_API_KEY: A....z
FILEPICKER_CDN_HOST: https://123abc.cloudfront.net
ADMIN_EMAILS: [email protected],[email protected]
DOWNLOADER_ID: 1234..1234
DOWNLOADER_SECRET: 1234..1234
DOWNLOADER_URL: us.downloader.io
Your environment variables on Heroku will need to be something like this:
MAIN_DOMAIN=yourdomain.com
SMTP_DOMAIN=post.yourdomain.me
RAILS_ENV=production
SECRET_KEY_BASE=1234..1234
DEVISE_SECRET_KEY=1234..1234
SENDGRID_USERNAME=username
SENDGRID_PASSWORD=password
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=UA-12345-67
FILEPICKER_API_KEY=A....z
FILEPICKER_CDN_HOST=https://123abc.cloudfront.net
[email protected],[email protected]
MAILCHIMP_API_KEY=f....3333-ek3
MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID=9982...112
###Things you may want to rip out
Filepicker has an option to use Cloudfront to serve up the photos you upload. This will make loading your images a bit faster, so I recommend it if you already have AWS setup. However, you can skip this if you don't want to mess with all that by simply setting FILEPICKER_CDN_HOST=https://www.filepicker.io.
If you want to bypass using Mailchimp to collect email addresses, simply don't put a value in for MAILCHIMP_API_KEY. I use Mailchimp to email out new features to the users at Dabble.me, so if you're the only one using your app it doesn't make sense to have Mailchimp.
###Administration Portal
The Admin emails are accounts that have access to the Admin Dropdown in the navbar (lock icon) that give you details into the number of entries and users in the system.
If you want random bits of inspiration, you can load up different quotes in the Inspiration table to be shown above the New Posts page and at the bottom of emails. If you plan on using OhLife, the system will tag imported posts with inspiration_id of 1 - so create the first Inspiration with a category name of "OhLife".
Inspiration.create(:category => "OhLife", :body => "Imported from OhLife")
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Current features:
- Read past entries by month/year
- Create new entries with simple formatting
- OhLife Importer
- Email: Reply-to-post new entries on days of the week you choose (with random past entries embedded)
- Associate 1 image to a specific entry, additional images emailed in will add to the bottom of posts
- Search with basic analytics around posting
- Hashtag support for tagging your entries