The state of Stellar

It’s been nearly three months since I launched Stellar in closed beta, so I thought it might be time for a status update.

I’ve been working steadily on the site since then and have made several improvements, notably in the scaling department, but it’s been slow-going because it’s just me and I’m not the world’s quickest programmer. (God, I’m learning a ton though.) Right now I’m working on a pretty major feature (in terms of modification to the site’s backend) that will hopefully make Stellar’s reading experience even better and, more importantly, pave the way for other additions and improvements in the future. After that’s done, there are lots of little improvements I want to push out to upgrade the reading experience in other ways. Can you tell that I’m focused on “the reading experience”?

Next: invites. When I opened up the invite request form in March, 7000 people (!!) signed up in fewer than 24 hours. The invite request form is still closed and I am still working on getting all of those folks off the waiting list (there are thousands still on the list but new invites go out every day). To everyone on the waiting list and to those waiting for the invite request form to open up again, I thank you for your patience. Like I said, I’m letting people in “reeeeally sloooowly”.

And thanks also to everyone for their feedback via email and Twitter…it’s been quite helpful in chasing down bugs and plotting out the future of the site. I’ve also been collecting some of the nice things people have been saying about the site here.

Finally, I’ve set up a Stellar leaderboard of sorts that shows some of the most-faved stuff on the site. It’s a regular Stellar account so you can follow it if you’re signed up. But it’s also publicly available for bookmarking, etc.

Pssst. If you’re on the waiting list (and only if you’re on the waiting list), bug me on Twitter and I’ll try (no promises!) to send an invite your way.

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