New Easy Optins for Your Site, Honesty, Fast Cars, Self-Love

Billy Joel wrote a great song called Honesty a while back, and it's still one of my favorites. Unfortunately, he didn't play it when I saw him at the garden last year. In fact, he skipped most of my favorite Billy Joel song. But I digress. 

I find that I much prefer that people tell me the truth, no matter how horrible it is. You hate me? Tell me. You're not sure you want to be with me? Bring it on, I can take it. You've kept something from me? Come clean now. You've done something horrible? Let it out. I'm a pretty compassionate, understanding person. Not saying that to brag, but I can really get behind most things, as long as we can be honest with each other. This goes in pretty much any relationship in my life. 

I think it's something society could use more of, honesty. If politicians and leaders and friends and family and people in the public life could say "yeah, I screwed up", and we could all move on.

But honesty can be hard, because the first step is to be honest with ourselves, and many people are not willing to do that.

It all boils down to self-love. If you can love yourself, regardless of anything, then you're not afraid of the truth, of any truth.

If you feel safe and you can love yourself, no matter what your circumstance, then you never have to be afraid of sharing the truth.

Simple. Easy to understand. Not so easy to live. 

Here's to honesty!

New Features in Simplero

It's been an incredibly productive week here at Simplero HQ. We've made several upgrades over the past week, and we have many more in the immediate future.

A big area of focus for us these days is on design, and ease of integrating Simplero with the rest of your world.

The first step in that direction is our new embedded opt-in forms. You can easily design your own opt-in box, add your copy to it, change your colors, choose whether to show it as a modal, a slide-in, or inline, and you get a simple snippet of code that you can easily put on your website and start collecting opt-ins.

There's no longer any need to hire a designer or a web nerd, you can do it all yourself from within Simplero.

We've also added a field that lets you add your own CSS that'll be used within the WYSIWYG editor. This lets you do things like customize to use your own color palette, or tweak how you want a blockquote to look like.

And we've cleaned up things around colors and settings and custom stylesheets, to make it easier to make Simplero look a way that matches your brand.

And we're just getting started. Expect much more along these lines 

Other highlights include an upgrade to Rails 5 and Ruby 2.3, which was a pretty big deal under the hood, and paves the way for future features. It also seems to have made Simplero somewhat faster, thanks to performance optimizations in both Rails and Ruby.

And we added the ability to preview your emails exactly as a given recipient is going to experience it, complete with personalizations, subject prefix, footer, magic links, and all. Again, in the interest of making you look your best.

It's really exciting times here, as we're conquering new territory.

Random Links from around the Interwebs

Verizon FiOS is apparently lying about the number of agents they have waiting for your call: Viewing the source reveals it's a randomly generated number.

Humanity has now engineered a bacteria that eats CO2 and spits out biofuel. How awesome is that!

The Tesla Model X is faster than an Alfa Romeo super-car ... even when the Tesla is towing along another identical Alfa Romeo super-car. That's fast. I bet Mr. Musk is basking in this.

That's all for this week.

Have a fantastic time until we meet next week.

Lots of love,
–Calvin