Back again, the development
After a vacation break, the development of quillcaster is about to begin.
I was not expecting the year 2024 to be this satisfying. After dusting my side projects in 2024, I was wondering to find the next right thing to build. Quillcaster was born out of my dissatisfaction with the existing social media tools. Initially, I wouldn’t want to spend all my energy building something that is not going to be used by anyone. To keep it simple, I always wanted to build a tool for end users, a day-to-day users of social network and not a company, a tool that can be triggered by a hotkey. The spark at the beginning of any project was a lot stronger compared to others.
Hence, I decided to build a browser extension which can do all the magic of posting content to different social media platforms. Every time I start a side-hustle, I focus more on the backend part of the project. This time, It’s the other way around. Seeing something on the screen that could potentially do the expected work, is the approach I took. I am kind of satisfied with the progress so far.
For the initial version of the application, which is in alpha stage, I managed to integrate github login, connecting to Mastodon, and posting thread based content to Mastodon platform. Everything runs on the browser as an extension. There is, of course, the API for processing the backend tasks.
After the extension is installed on your browser, the first thing is to create/login to your Quillcaster account.
When the setup is done, where you connect to social networks on the first account creation, you see a screen to trigger the shortcut.
Finally, whenever you trigger the hotkey, does not matter in which tab you are in, you are shown a dialog to post content. This dialog has all the necessary things that you need to manage your social posting.
As you can see from the above image, there are options for scheduling, retrieving your saved drafts and deleting the drafts. The whole idea is to keep things minimal and simple to manage. There is an ongoing work on the settings page for tweaking user interface and others.
There is no development for almost a month. I was on a long vacation. Most of the developers who work on JavaScript ecosystem know the complexity of package management. Yes, I am currently struggling with that. It might take sometime as I am juggling with my day job and the side-hustle. But, I can ensure it’s going to be steady progress.