Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

I went into this cycle with the goal of wrapping up the work on the image CDN. This is one of those times where I clearly underestimated the complexity and amount of work required. It's going to take a bit of time to wrap up the image CDN work on the WordPress side.

I'm also noticing a significant slowdown in sign-ups. I think it's because I've slacked off on marketing for too long. It's hard to know for sure because things are never the same from month to month.

But with all of this in mind, I decided mid-marketing week to readjust my overall strategy. I'm going to go back to being diligent about doing one week product and one week marketing. To do so, I'm going to release the image CDN feature in two separate phases.

I'll discuss it more in the product and marketing sections.

PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

This cycle I spent a lot of time reverse engineering the Tachyon plugin and the photon module of the Jetpack plugin. The goal of the image CDN is to offer a similar feature set. The problem is the code is really hard to read, which makes it hard for me to know what's important and what's not.

Carl Alexander @twigpress I think I'm slowly losing my mind trying to untangle this code lol pic.twitter.com/kphaY6u2jk April 8th 2022 0 Retweets 4 Likes

Now, the thing is that the WordPress code is there to do dynamic resizing. It doesn't do image optimization. That's done by the content delivery network changes that's already in beta.

So with that in mind, I'm just going to release the image optimization as a standalone thing next cycle. It works well as is. It converts images to webp which is something a lot of people pay for already.

This will remove some of the pressure I have to finish the dynamic resize and other things I need from the WordPress plugin. I can slowly work on it while marketing what I have already.

MARKETING

As I said, I decided mid-marketing week that I'd shift my overall strategy for the image CDN. I've had an article related to it in the back of my mind for a while. So I started working on it.

Not sure if I'll manage to finish it next cycle since it's an in-depth tutorial like WordPress page caching with CloudFront one. But these are great articles to write. They help Ymir's long term SEO strategy, which is to rank well for WordPress/WooCommerce sysadmin, devops and AWS content.

I'm also going to do a talk for WordSesh in May. It's on continuous integration so not exactly serverless related. But it'll give me the opportunity to mention Ymir.

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

VERY slow month so far. I've had one sign up. Average is usually 10+ per month with the last two months having almost 20 sign ups.

There are no active trials and one pending cancellation. This still puts me at a net +1 for the month. But it's not a great position to be in.

Carl