I was surprised by most people with the announcement that the “free” Twitter API was going away.

First there was a bit of a panic, I’ve been using the Twitter API for long time to build many applications, in the past for paid products, thankfully none at the moment, but I’ve had the idea for a couple that I was thinking about building at some point soon.

After thinking about the situation, I do actually think this could be a good thing in the long run, if done correctly. As is becoming the norm for Twitter operations, we get an announcement, with any details. I have a sense this is being used to gauge users reaction and get feedback before all the details are solidified.

What would I do?

Keep the API free for accessing your Twitter data. So anyone can still embed their own content on their own website, etc.

Keep the API free to empower “Login with Twitter”.

Anything that reads content from other users, or users authenticated with oAuth, would be part of the paid tier.

Anything that writes content would be part of the paid tier.

That’s it, pretty simple. The actual pricing should be tied to usage. With a generous base price, to encourage people to actually to use the API in a constructive way.

How would this affect the current landscape?

All scheduling tools would need to access the paid API tool. This seems reasonable, since they all charge users a monthly fee.

Most other tools that aggregate, summarize or analyze Twitter data from multiple users would likely be part of the paid tier.

Anyone wanting to show their own Tweets would be able to get a free API key to use. There may be some work need for tools to collect the users API keys, instead of using the current application keys.

Want to export/archive your own Tweets, you can still get an API key for that.

What will be actually see?

Since the announcement seems to imply there will be no free tier, we may not see anything like what I have described.

Getting rid of the free tier entirely would be a very bad mistake in my mind.

We just have to wait a few days and we’ll see the plans.

Originally published at https://mubs.me.

tldr: I built a website that allows you to easily stay in touch with the 2019 premier league title run-in: titlerace.me

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know I’m a big fan of the English Premier League. Yesterday as my team, Liverpool, failed to win its latest game against local rivals Everton. I scrambled to find out the details of the remaining season for Liverpool and their closet rival, Manchester city.

I failed to find anything except a couple of news stories that have a combined schedule, information what would quickly become out of date.

With a couple of months still remaining of the Premier league season I wondered if there was a way to scratch my own itch and build something to help me stay tapped into the Premier League title race drama that is sure to follow.

I even tweeted recently about wanting to build something, so why not give it a go.

Mubashar Iqbal on Twitter

As you can probably tell from my tweets I'm a huge @premierleague fan. If you want to build something football related in 2019 and are looking for a developer my DMs are open. https://t.co/V6pE4BavPI

The Criteria

I had a small list of criteria if I was to build something…

Quick

I’m very busy with the day job and other projects that moment so I had to be able to build something in the remaining time last night.

Zero Maintenance

Going back to the being busy situation, what solution I was to build should require no maintenance, it should update itself with the latest standings information and upcoming schedules.

Low Cost / Free

Since this was a side project to scratch my own itch, I don’t see any revenue potential. The solution should incur no significant costs.

The Outcome

I decided to build a website that was optimized for mobile screens, so I could check in on the title race where ever I am.

At a glance you can see the current standings, and the upcoming fixtures for both of the teams in contention for the title.

Zero Maintenance

I’ve been searching for football related APIs for MLS but I’ve come across many APIs that cover the Premier league. I decided to use the data from Football-data.

football-data.org - ur src for machine readable football data

This meant I was able to gather all the information I needed, updated frequently, with no manual involvement. The website could be updated automatically.

Quick

When building for speed, it’s best to stick with what you know, so I stuck with my preferred stack: Laravel for the backend; Bootstrap for the frontend. I decided to forgo any database, and just have the website work directly with the data from the Football-data API. Another way to reduce the complexity and have less things to build.

I’ve built many websites with this stack so I felt comfortable being able to build something quickly. In the end I only need a couple of hours (yes that meant 2 hours less sleep last night) to decide what I need to build and then build it.

Low Cost / Free

Since built the website in Laravel there are plenty of hosting options. Since I already have a few servers and the resources required here are minimal I decided add Title Race to one of those server. I could have uploaded the site to Heroku which has a free tier to avoid any costs.

Football-data also has a free tier which includes the Premier League data, so no cost there. If I had wanted a more complete picture of games remaining (in the FA Cup and UEFA Champions leagues), there is an upgrade available. If you want to sponsor the site and enable me to upgrade let me know 😀

My only actual expense was the purchase of new domain. I could have avoided this by hosting the site on a subdomain of an existing domain I owned, or when using a service like Heroku they also offer subdomain on it’s own herokuapp.com domain.

I decided I wanted something quick and easy to type in, so I purchased titlerace.me for $3.88 from Namecheap. The renewal price if I decide I need this site again next year is a little higher, but we’ll see how next season progresses before I have to worry about that.

If you’re a fan of the Premier League I hope you checkout the site, and let me know what you think.

Title Race: Easily follow the run-in for the 2019 Premier League season

Good luck to Liverpool!

Announcing: Title Race was originally published in Make Side Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I posted this tweet yesterday:

Mubashar Iqbal on Twitter

Hospitals in the USA are now required to publish online price lists of the services they provide. I hope someone is working to aggretate and make these easily searchable/comparable. #ideas #requestforproduct #requestforstartup

In this video I talk about little more about the idea and how I would approach building the MVP.

Let me know if you build it!

Towards the end of 2017 I decided to stop freelancing and go back to a full time job. I wanted to do less in 2018 and I did.

I sold off a couple of projects, shut down a couple of old projects, and even let some unused domains expire without renewing them.

Day Job

People are often surprised to hear I have a day job. The amount of projects I normally push out they think I do it full time.

AREA 17 is a great place to work. Every day I learn something new from some of the most talented people I know, designers, developers, project managers, and all round great people!

I helped to make some great websites for our clients.

NYTCo

The Art Institute of Chicago

Translation

Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation

Many of the websites we built are coded using Twill, a CMS we built and open sourced.

I’m very excited to see Twill continue to grow and become the preferred choice for anyone making a website in 2019.

Personal

My oldest daughter started high school this year. She is in a school where her graduating class will be over 3000 kids. I thought my 300 graduating class was large. Now that she’s in high school, she has to be on the school bus at 6:30am, which means I’m now a morning person. Never thought I would do that.

Went to Maine and New Hampshire for the first time and at the 2nd attempt at whale watching, saw some amazing sites.

Also visited Washington, DC for the first time.

Side Projects

In the previous 3 years I had launched 23, 12, 16 products but in 2018 I launched just 6. Followed thru on my plan to do less.

It was great working with Ben Tossell again, this time on NewCo, now MakerPad.

I did however make a lot more. In November alone I completed 6 projects, while participating in 3 hackathons (Hack Mohawk Valley, 24 Hour Startup and Makers Festival).

Not every project is the next Facebook, Google of whatever. I had a great time participating in these hackathons, in making, and I hope to do more hackathons this year.

Looking Forward

I expect to launch less again in 2019, perhaps not less than 2018, but still less than pervious years. I’ll also continue the purge of previous projects, shutting down or selling more, to reduce the distractions.

Just like last year though I expect to make more.

I think it’s ok to make things, to practice, to hone my skills by making and then discard. I see this as the same as an artist, reusing a canvas. You take everything you learned and apply it to the next project.

Side projects for me, have always been great way to learn and grow as a maker, this year I hope to help other become makers.

I’ll be experimenting with podcasting, video casting and live streaming and sharing all my learnings on Indiesaas.

I’ve had a stutter since I was around 5 years old. I’m told the “emotional trauma” of moving to a new country caused my speech problems.

When I was younger I spent many sessions with therapists working through my speech problems. Although I was never fully cured, my speech improved a lot and I developed coping techniques to work around the problem.

I’ve tried not to let my stuttering affect my life, personally or professionally. However, stuttering your own name makes it difficult in many situations you find yourself in day in day out. Always in the back of my mind the thought that I’d stutter and stumble lives on.

Despite these fears I’ve been a guest on podcasts, made presentations in front of audiences small and large. Yes I’ve had problems making it thru these (who doesn’t?), but that just adds to challenge and great feeling making to thru successfully to the end.

I think I’m a better Maker because of my stuttering.

So much of making is breaking thru mental obstacles as much as technical or business ones.

The thick skin I developed from being teased a child, helps dealing with the “feedback” you get on places like HackerNews and online in general.

Trying to do the things, that others find so easy and straightforward, again and again before feeling comfortable, showed me that I can find my own path, and not worry about following other peoples.

I learned despite the obstacles that lives presents you, you are the single biggest factor in being successful or not. I could have chosen to let the stuttering define who I am, but I have not and will not.

Everyone who stutters has their own way to dealing with their stuttering.

I like to challenge my problems head on. In 2019 I want to take on my stuttering, so I’ll be doing more with audio. I hope you’ll come and hear me talk about the things I do with side projects and indie businesses, not just read about them in blog posts like this one.

I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, a formal podcast or more impromptu recordings and live streams to exercise my vocal muscles. Everything will be published here on Medium or on my new project Indie saas. I’m also toying with the idea of doing book readings, as a way to getting more comfortable with speaking out loud and getting comfortable hearing my own voice. If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them!

I’ve been a remote work since the summer of 2000. Yes that’s over 18 years. While a lot has changed, and being a remote worker is much easier than it used to be, one thing remains a constant problem … timezones.

Although I don’t travel a lot any more, I work frequently with people who do. All the recent nomad worker trend has made the problem even larger.

Once you know someones timezone there are many tools that make scheduling meetings less painful, but keeping up with people as they work and travel on the road has become a big problem.

As I was brainstorming idea for Product Hunt’s Makers Festival I naturally drifted towards the Remote Worker category. I started thinking about the problem of timezones and how that problem could be solved.

I wondered if the approach that Gravatar had taken to solve the problem of identifying people thru their avatar could be applied to timezones.

What if a user could manage their timezone in one place, and that place provided an easy way to share to access that information globally. By doing so, updating your timezone in one place might see it updated globally.

I started thinking about names, and gravitated towards the idea of “my timezone is”, something that users of the platform would be sharing. The other reason that I drifted towards this name was because I own the domain name mytimezoneis.com, since 2008. Clearly this was a problem I wanted to solve for a very long time!

The MVP

Since I was building my solution as part of the Makers Festival, I didn’t have a lot of time to build things, what exactly could I get done to submit before the deadline.

I wanted to model My Timezone Is on the Gravatar solution.

Email addresses would be the unique identifier, since most services require an email address to create an account this seems reasonable. With that email address anyone should be able to discover the timezone for a user. The email address should not be publicly shared. We want to protect users from spam if we can.

Rather than wait for people to integrate My Timezone Is into their applications, I wanted to provide something users could use immediately after signing up.

A small javascript widget they could add to their personal site, that should their current timezone, that was easily updated.

As part of the registration process we guess the users timezone based on their browser settings. Once signed up the user can set their timezone directly from the official list of timezones, but by typing the name of the city they are in. This was made possible with integrations with Algolia Places and GeoNames.

The javascript widget code is presented right on the dashboard that can be added to any website. I’ve added the widget to my personal website.

I implemented a simple REST API for accessing a users timezone and documented it here.

I have lots of ideas for future enhancements: A chrome extension or desktop application to track the timezones of your friends; image badges to make sharing your timezone even easier and universal; an OAuth based publish API to allow external applications to set a users timezone to name just a few.

For now I’ll submit My Timezone Is to the ProductHunt Makers Festival and see what everyone things of the idea so far!

Announcing: My Timezone Is… was originally published in Make Side Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m a big fan of Twitter, an avid users since 2008. I’ve found it to be the best social media platform for meeting new people, having interesting discussions and sharing great content.

Over the years I’ve used a number of tools that helped me get the most out of Twitter and the community that I’d become a part off.

After I found out that most tweets you post are only seen by 20% of your followers, I looked to find a way to increase the number. After I didn’t find anything worked for me I decided to build my own solution.

ICYMI is a product that makes it easy to re-share your best content on Twitter, in a way that augments your activity, rather than replacing it.

Through documenting my adventures in making side projects, I’ve been able to a mass a number of, what I think, are high quality articles. From stories about product histories and launches, to series covering the entire process of making projects there is something there for everyone.

I would share these articles as I published them, and while they would get read by a good number of people, they would quickly get lost in the feed of activity.

ICYMI takes this library of quality content and re-shares that content when you are not active on Twitter. Rather post things on a set schedule, what is the best schedule anyway? ICYMI waits until you’re not active for a set period of times and post an items from your library.

I’ve tried other tools that allow you to post things on a set schedule and I found that they could post things randomly in the middle of a conversation I was having on Twitter and people would get confused how that post was relevant. By waiting until you’re not active to post things, you avoid this situation entirely. You also remove the need to painstakingly create a posting schedule.

I originally had planned to ship ICYMI as part of The 24 Hour Startup Challenge, but due to some technical problems and time constraints I wasn’t able to do that. You can watch my 18 hour long stream building ICYMI.

I ended up shipping something else for the 24 Hour Startup Challenge, which I built in the 6 hours I had remaining 🙃

So instead I worked to complete ICYMI and am entering it into the Product Hunt Makers Festival (yes Product Hunt said it was ok to do that, since all the work took place during the time of the festival schedule). While not suited to one of the themes Product Hunt has selected, it could help anyone working on products in those themes and others make effective use of Twitter.

I still have a lot of updates I’d like to make to ICYMI, you can sign up here to keep informed as I add new features.

Would love for you to checkout ICYMI and let me know what you think.

ICYMI: I launched ICYMI was originally published in Make Side Project on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.