Reacting quickly and properly to customer needs is table stakes. It’s no longer enough to simply give your customers a satisfactory experience if you want to maintain customer loyalty. This is because almost half of customers say they’d look to take their business elsewhere immediately if they experienced poor customer service. And only around 4% of dissatisfied customers reach out to a company when they have a problem. This means for every customer who tells you they’re unhappy, you need to keep in mind there’s likely another 24 just like them.

So you need to be able to stop them from needing to reach out to support in the first place, and Manuscript’s Crash Reporting functionality can help you do just that.

Manuscript provides a simple API known as BugzScout, which allows you to send new bugs directly to Manuscript. It’s a great way to automatically report bugs from any of your websites or applications.

For example, for each version of your application that you release you can gather and consolidate data about crashes or even let users send feature requests straight into Manuscript. Reports can include the Project and Area the new case should be created in, so it goes directly to the teams that need to know. And you can include any other information that’d be useful in fixing the issue, like a stack trace, operating environment information, HTTP headers, or other details about what might have caused the error.

BugzScout submissions are consolidated into one case based on the description you set. So after a bug has been created for a particular type of issue, subsequent cases are appended to it. The number of occurrences and last occurrence date and time are shown in the case. This enables you to prioritize the bugs impacting the most users first, and you have an easy way to follow-up with those users by updating a single case.

By having your applications report problems you’re able to spot issues earlier, sometimes before they’ve even impacted a customer. This results in fewer total support requests, so your support team has more time to handle their more involved cases. This is a great benefit as such pro-active customer support doesn’t just lead to improved customer loyalty, but happier employees too.

No-one working in customer support likes to let a customer down. Support staff are happier when they’re able to spend time on meaningful interactions with customers. By staying ahead of customer issues with crash reporting in Manuscript, you can do just that.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

One Way to Get Pro-Active with Your Customer Support

I was relaxing by the pool when I noticed a tall, tanned, handsome man on the other side. I would have described him as cool except he was contorting his body quite strangely. He was looking this way and had his arm outstretched.

This funny little dance was just the end part of how this perfect pool snap came to be, though. For weeks leading up to the vacation, he’d probably been going to the gym and watching what he was eating — getting into ‘beach-shape’. And it’s likely he knocked-out a couple of dozen press-ups in his room before heading to the pool for good measure too.

I’m sure the final shot looked great — but its creative process belies the effortless, chilled-out pool scene it captured.

Which got me thinking — when it comes to publishing our apps and side-projects online, we kind of do the same thing. The slick, polished look of the app and it’s refactored, tidied-up codebase doesn’t tell the real story about how it was created. It skips the hours spent digging into that elusive bug, the time stuck while crafting a particularly tricky piece of logic, and the endless UI tweaks to get it looking just right.

The difference though is that we know the slick images we see on Instagram and in magazines are air-brushed, filtered, or at the very least cherry-picked from a photo library filled with half-blinking eyes and unflattering angles. But when it comes to programming, seeing others’ amazing creations can make us doubt our own abilities and lead us to wonder why we can’t create such considered code. But we really shouldn’t, because this polished perfection is a distorted reality.

In part, this is why Glitch looks the way that it does. The aesthetic of Glitch is a rejection of the idea that everything on the internet has to look ‘designed’ or ‘professional’. It’s also why when creating Rewind, we chose to leave a project’s change history in remixed projects.

When starting from a remix you might have expected it’d just be a blank slate. But we include the original project’s change history so you can see how the app was built. By seeing the development of a project laid out in front of you, knowing who changed what and when, you get a better understanding of how an app has evolved over time.

You can see the mistakes, yes, but also the flashes of genius: the tweak that made the app faster, and the revision which tightened up the UI. We think this more accurately reflects how we create code. Because no matter whether you’re new to coding or have years of experience, we all make mistakes. And that’s ok.

The hope is that this small design choice helps people form a better understanding of how things really get created. With Glitch, we want to celebrate the creative process, warts and all, as much as the fantastic results that come from your coding blood, sweat and tears.

Celebrating the Creative Process — Warts and All

Glitch is the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. We want to introduce you to different ways to build those apps. In this video series, we talk about HTML, JS, CSS and Node.js. Through 4 short videos we cover what they are, why you might use them and when. And we look at 4 remixable example apps that use them.

We talk about HTML, what it is, what its limitations are and we cover some actual HTML code that makes up the intro to HTML example website.

We learn about CSS, classes and how we can use CSS to make our website look nicer.

This video provides an introduction to JavaScript, what it is and how we could use it to add behaviors and functions to our site.

We explain what Node.js is, how web servers work and the types of things you can use Node.js for in your own apps.

You’ll find other resources which will help you to learn to code on Glitch. And if you get stuck, just raise your hand.

Learn How to Make Your Own Site With the Website Starter Kit

‘Start from something that works’ is one of the guiding principles behind Glitch. It’s important because the odds that someone will be successful when creating something are much higher then than if you start with a blank page and a pile of parts.

We don’t want you to get frustrated just getting things to work, so we’ve made a ton of apps you can use as jumping off points. But this isn’t some closed shop — anyone can submit an app they’ve created to glitch.com for others to see, use and remix!

In fact, in addition to the recent major new additions to Glitch, we’ve also made design changes to glitch.com to make community-submitted apps even more prominent. Your apps can be featured right on the homepage, so people can see the fantastic things you’ve created, get inspired and use them to create their own things too.

But in order to get your apps in shipshape to be featured, we’ve put together a few tips on how to best present your apps to the world.

The contents of your project’s readme.md file is what gets shown on glitch.com. Think of it as being like an App Store description, rather than a typical readme on GitHub or elsewhere. This is your spot to get people interested in your project, so it should really sell it.

Cover what the project does, why it’s useful and what users will need to do to get their own version of the project working (adding in API keys etc.). But keep it short — around 100 words total.

The readme is also the place to show folks what your project looks like and how it functions. Include a screenshot, or even better, a gif.

If the setup instructions are more than a few lines, then add a setup.md file to your project and use that to go into the detail. Be prescriptive and try not to make too many assumptions. We want projects to be accessible to a wide audience with differing skill levels. So avoid jargon and acronyms whenever possible.

Set your project avatar — it’s a 200x200 file, but they’re often shown at 33x33 and 18x18 on the site and in the app, so they should display well when small.

Also set your project description and a relevant project title, which also functions as your project’s URL.

By adding a license to your project people know where they stand — what they can and can’t do with it. We’ve put together some advice if you get stuck, but it doesn’t need to be an arduous thing. In fact, we’ve made the ability to add a license (and a Code of Conduct) to your project a one-click thing in Glitch.

In-line code explanations are super helpful, so if you have time, then please add them. Also, be sure to remove any extraneous dependencies and unused code.

We’ve made a Glitch button to make it super easy for folks to see who contributed to the project, and move between your app and its code. So, if it’s appropriate to the design of your app feel free to include that too.

Putting a “Remix on Glitch” button on your project’s page makes it super simple for others to get started using Glitch! Click the “Share” button and then click the “Share Buttons” button at the bottom of this menu. You’ll find code there which you add anywhere your project is featured, including a GitHub repo!

We’ve made it easy for you to embed your new project anywhere, including on your own website, a blog post, or in any documentation. Click the “Share” button and then click the “Embed Project” button to find our Embed Project wizard. In this pop-up, you can choose to display your code or your project, and swap the orientation of the panes. Toggle the checkbox to display attribution, and then copy the code to embed your project!

Once you’re ready, let us know about your project! Share it on Twitter, and if you’d like to see it featured then submit it for consideration.

But you don’t have to have made an app to suggest one — anyone can submit an app they liked on Glitch to be featured.

The Essential Elements of a Fab Featured App

I’ve experienced this kind of separate setup, see if any of this sounds familiar:

Customers email in reporting bugs and they get routed into the Support team’s Helpdesk software. Meanwhile, the development team track their development tasks, like bug fixes, in their own separate bug tracking software. So for the developers to hear about the bugs you have a weekly meeting with the Development team lead. In this meeting Support flag up the priority customer issues, tickets get created in the bug tracking software and added to the backlog for the upcoming sprint.

But without an integration between the two systems, you have to add links, manually.

The Development team adds links to the emails in Support’s Helpdesk system from the issues they’ve opened in the bug tracker, in order to provide context for the developers tasked to fix them. Meanwhile, the Support team add links to the development tasks in the Development team’s bug tracker so they can track progress on fixes for customers’ problems.

And this works, sort of. Problems get reported and things do get fixed — it’s just not very efficient.

There’s the time spent finding the issues in the respective systems, as well as the duplication of effort in creating the links back and forth. Of course, folks sometimes forget to add links to the bug tracking tasks or help desk tickets, so some things slip through the cracks. With no notifications of updates, you have to rely on noticing the work has been completed to update a customer. If a customer comes back with more information about an issue then the developer probably won’t see it either.

Feature requests are a whole different problem, with spreadsheets or tasks being added along with, you guessed it, yet more links.

It’s fair to say that working this way, things get messy, quickly.

So Manuscript does things differently. We fuse bug tracking and a helpdesk together, so you have a single place where issues get reported and fixed. This means you collaborate on issues — with members of both the support and development teams working together.

In Manuscript, since emails are cases the developers have all the context they need. If a customer provides additional info, they see it. And if a customer reports a critical issue, you can assign the case to a developer for immediate action. Of course, because the systems are seamlessly integrated there are no links to remember update, so you don’t miss anything either.

But it’s not just about being more responsive, it means you can become pro-active too.

Having bug tracking and a helpdesk together makes it easier for you to incorporate customer feedback directly into the development process. With our Crash Reporting functionality, you can have your software report errors, exceptions, and in-app customer feedback itself. So you know which bugs to prioritize with the recording of the number of customers impacted.

Of course, you get all the stuff you’d expect in a helpdesk — like the ability to prioritize, assign, track, and of course, reply to customer emails. But then we take it a step further by triaging those emails for you. Using AI, customer emails go straight to the relevant team or member’s inbox. And since inquiries demand a different kind of response whether, for example, they’re reporting a bug or suggesting a feature, we enable you to set different workflows by type of email.

Long-time customer, Rogue Amoeba, began using Manuscript for exactly this reason. They started with just a help desk product, but found that it wasn’t enough — “having support and bug tracking in one place is something we wanted to do,” says CEO, Paul Kafasis. With Manuscript, they found that “having the customer communication together with feature requests and bugs, was really useful so we could communicate with a customer and say ‘oh yea that’s fixed in so and so version’”. It also meant that staff could seamlessly transition between roles, for example, “one of our support techs transitioned to development, so he’s seen both sides of it.”

By more efficiently handling customer inquiries, you’ll have more time to spend actually solving their problems. While having development and support staff working closer together means your whole team are better informed about customer problems, feature requests and the work required to implement them. The result of this is you can build better products.

Bug Tracking and Helpdesk Software: Better Together

Glitch launched in beta a year ago. And this week, we recapped how Glitch has delivered an easier way for coders to create on the web right from the start, with things like real-time collaborative editing, instant deployment and automatic secure hosting.

Since then, Glitch has evolved based on community feedback—your feedback. We’ve added real-time help, a console, and the ability to thank creators as well as easily add licenses and a code of conduct.

But to get Glitch ready for the world to come in and build, there were still a few things that we wanted to add. So each day this week we’ve made a major announcement. Look at all this cool stuff!

We released the very first details about our upcoming  offering, so developers, designers and anyone with an idea can create real, full-power production apps incredibly easily on Glitch. You can sign up to learn more, help shape its development and to be the first to hear about Glitch for Teams.

We unveiled , which allows you to embed Glitch apps anywhere on the web. And we shared how we’re working with Slack, Major League Hacking, freeCodeCamp and Mouse to make it even easier for coders to learn new skills.

We announced unprecedented new developer tools like full-stack view source, which lets you can see the complete code behind apps running live on the web — server-side as well as client-side, for the first time ever. You can even debug your apps right from in your browser! Plus, Glitch apps now have much more room, along with an improved developer experience that can even be faster and less frustrating than working on your own computer.

Then, just yesterday, we launched . This reinvents version control with a groundbreaking new user interface that gives you the easiest, most fun user interface for undoing changes and rolling your project back in time that any developer tool has ever had.

And with that, we’re happy to rip off the beta label. Glitch is now out of beta!

Today, we’re making a big leap forward: The Glitch.com community is now open-source.

You see, there’s a little app that runs glitch.com, that helps you explore apps, discover new projects, and show off a profile for you or your team. You’ve always been able to view the source code of that app, as naturally, it runs on Glitch. But since the community is at the heart of Glitch, it only felt right that community members like you should be able to shape the development of glitch.com itself.

So now you can remix the site to suggest ideas for the community, and make a home for yourself on Glitch. Learn more about how to contribute. Soon, we plan to open-source even more parts of Glitch, with your help.

Anil and Jenn hosted hosted a livestream discussing this exciting change. Catch the recording.

Thanks so much to everyone in the Glitch community for taking part in this week of announcements and here’s to building a better web, together. We have one final request: tell your friends. For all the work we’ve done in making Glitch a welcoming community, we’re still a tiny little team trying to support a huge community that’s going to change the web. We’re doing it entirely independently. So we’re going to need your help to get the word out about Glitch.

If Glitch seems like something special, something promising to you, tell the creative people in your life that they belong here in the community with us. We can’t wait to see what you create together!

Glitch Opens Up: Welcome!

Glitch Rewind

When you’re in the middle of coding, nothing’s more frustrating than the risk of losing the work you’ve been doing. And nothing’s more liberating than knowing you can undo any of your mistakes at any time if you need to.

Right now, the answer to those problems is overly-complicated version control solutions. Coders are forced to learn a frustrating system where they spend way too much time trying to remember obscure commands and worrying that they might accidentally break their project. And those who aren’t coders just figure this is another one of those barriers that keep people out.

It all adds up to a situation where people don’t create, experiment and innovate like they want to, because making a mistake has too high a cost.

There’s a fundamentally better way to undo errors in your code and review any point in the past history of your project: Glitch Rewind.

Glitch Rewind is the easiest, most powerful version control for coders, ever. As you work, Glitch automatically checks in your code, even handling multiple authors seamlessly. (Because Glitch lets you and your collaborators code together in real-time!) Then, with Rewind, you can see every change, every commit, and walk backwards in time through all those edits, just by scrolling back on the timeline. It’s as easy as rewinding a video on YouTube.

But Glitch’s rewind feature does even more.

You can see who edited a file, with their avatar right next to their changes. You can see how big a change was to a file by the size of the bar. You can tell what kind of file was changed because everything’s color-coded, just like in the Glitch editor’s file list. And if you import a project from GitHub, your history comes with it.

But best of all, you already know how to use it.

By seeing the history of your project laid out in front of you, knowing who changed what and when — your confidence grows. You never have to worry about losing a single line of code, and you know you’re safe to try out ideas because undoing mistakes is a piece of cake.

Behind the scenes, it’s still just regular Git — you can use Glitch’s console to run Git commands to work with your code if you want to do things the hard way. You can use your git tools with your Glitch project just like it’s a regular git repo, because it is. We just think that once you’ve used the interface, you won’t want to go back to being nervous about making a commit or trying to wrap your head around git HEAD issues.

We’re enabling Glitch Rewind for beautiful and brilliant version control on every Glitch project, for free today.

So far this week, we’ve announced embeds, an improved development experience, and now Rewind. But we’re not done yet, check back tomorrow for our final announcement of the week as Glitch comes out of beta and gets ready to greet the world.

Reinventing Version Control with Glitch Rewind

Full-stack View Source and Instant Installs for Node on Glitch

With Glitch, we’re tackling some of the biggest pain points in Web Development, ones that have been there so long we now take them for granted. Rather than accept the status quo though, we’re creating the development experience we’ve always hoped would exist, not the one we’ve ended up with.

In the early days of the web, the way people learned how others had built things was simple: They used View Source.

View Source in your browser let you see the HTML, scripts, and styles that made up any page you visited. Later, great tools like Firebug, the Web Inspector, and Chrome’s Developer Tools took that to the next level, with features like source maps that let you really understand what your browser was handling. But even in today’s best progressive web apps, a lot of key functionality still happens on the server, meaning what’s happening behind a running app has been impossible to look at.

But now with full-stack view source on Glitch, that all changes.

Using the standard Developer Tools built into your Chrome browser, Glitch lets you see all of the code that runs your Glitch app, including the server-side code. You can set breakpoints, step through your code, and see the live code on both the client and the server, all right from your browser. This makes it easier than ever to troubleshoot small problems in your app and get them fixed quickly, without having to set up a complicated dev environment, worry about deployment, configure a debugger, or mess around with logging things to the console.

When you’re trying to get a new idea out in the world, speed of development is one of the biggest factors that decides whether you can get it built before that initial spark gets lost. The gold standard for a lot of creators is a local development setup — most cloud development environments just can’t match it. But running in the cloud provides us with some unique advantages that we can leverage to bring that same pace and responsiveness to development on Glitch.

Today, we’ve taken another step towards that with instant installs for node modules. Any common module is now automatically there when your project needs it. Especially when working with large or compiled modules it’s now multiple times faster than it was before, even as fast as developing on your local machine.

To show you what we mean, we set up a few projects using the same code and popular modules like Socket.io, Puppeteer, and TicTacToe.js on a recent MacBook and on Glitch. Thanks to instant installs, we found that each was at least three times quicker to get to a working app on Glitch than it used to be. When things are that fast, you can try out more ideas, and get problems solved faster.

Even better, node modules no longer count against the storage limits on your Glitch projects. Previously the project size limit included node_modules, meaning you could sometimes exceed the space quota, forcing you to restrict the number and size of dependencies you could use. But not anymore! Now dependencies don’t count against the storage limit on your Glitch app — only your code does.

There are huge improvements to working with files within Glitch, too: You can now copy and paste large files right into your Glitch project. Gone are the copy/paste size limits, as well as the size restrictions on files that can appear in the editor, and the cap on the number of project files shown.

We’ve also improved our support for slow or flaky internet connections. Now, if you lose connection while developing on Glitch you can just keep typing — all your changes will be merged in once your connection comes back.

With Glitch, you’re part of the friendly community that will help you build the app of your dreams. And we’re lifting the limits on your projects while making development on Glitch even faster than was possible before.

And we’re not done yet! We have major new product announcements every day this week. Yesterday we introduced the ability to embed your Glitch project anywhere on the web, along with partnerships with Major League Hacking, Mouse, freeCodeCamp and teaming up with Slack. Check back tomorrow for our biggest announcement yet.

Tackling the Biggest Pain Points in Web Development

Glitch is already the friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams. But during this week of announcements, we’ll show you how Glitch is also the most innovative development platform on the web today.

Part of helping us all build a better web together requires easy to use tools that can be used by anyone, anywhere. So we’re enabling you to use Glitch everywhere, with the ability to embed your live, running code anywhere on the web — from landing pages, to blog posts and documentation, to news stories and articles.

Today, it’s really easy to embed a video, a song or social media on your website or blog. But embedding a whole app has become nearly impossible.

Now, Glitch makes it as easy to share an app on your site as it is to embed a YouTube video. Whether you have an interactive visualization you want to share, a cool art project, or a useful little tool, you can embed Glitch apps anywhere. It’s a killer way to demonstrate a new tech platform or API, on your blog or in your documentation.

Whenever you see a cool Glitch app, just copy and paste the code to embed that app on your site. It works with most blogging tools like Medium and WordPress, and you can completely customize the look and feel of your embed — choose to show your app, the code that powers it, or both at the same time.

And since nothing explains an idea better than real, running code, embedding Glitch on your page lets your audience remix and edit the app directly within the embed.

Welcoming Education Organizations to Glitch

But building a better web also needs everyone to have the opportunity to learn coding skills. So today we’re excited to welcome some of the most respected tech education organizations to the Glitch community, helping to make learning to code more accessible. These include:

We’ve teamed up with Slack, providing Glitch as the preferred coding platform for Slack Platform Sessions. Sessions are Slack’s wildly popular online live-coding events, where they teach hundreds of developers at the same time everything from the basics, to the advanced tips and tricks involved in making apps for Slack.

We’re partnering with Mouse, a national youth development nonprofit that empowers all young people to create with technology and make meaningful change. Glitch will be part of the Mouse Create learning platform, expanding how Mouse brings web literacy, coding, and creative computing to young people, especially those from underserved communities across the country.

freeCodeCamp is a community that helps you learn to code and get experience by contributing to open source projects used by nonprofits. As part of their redeveloped curriculum, they’ll be using Glitch for teaching back-end development, testing, and security.

We’re partnering with Major League Hacking on MLH Localhost. Major League Hacking is the community for student hackers, supporting hundreds of hacker clubs, events, and hackathons around the world each year. MLH Localhost is MLH’s student engagement and education program, providing educational content on cutting-edge technologies, and they’re now hosting some of this content on Glitch, helping serve its community of over 65,000 hackers.

Glitch also makes it possible to build real, working web apps on any device — including creating them entirely on a mobile phone or tablet, with best-in-class support for remixing and creating on devices like Chromebooks, iPads, and even hand-me-down laptops. With nothing to install, Glitch is a great option for use on locked-down PCs like those in schools and libraries too.

You just need a screen, keyboard and an internet connection and you can build the app of your dreams on Glitch. And now those apps and your code can live on any site on the web.

But this is just the first of the announcements we’re making this week. Check back tomorrow to learn more about how we’re improving the platform to make Glitch faster, and better than ever before.

Making Learning to Code More Accessible

Anil Dash is CEO of Glitch, and the host of Function, a podcast exploring how technology shapes culture and society. 

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Maurice Cherry is Glitch's creative strategist.

Incidents

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Animal Crossing Helped Me Get Back to Real Life

New Rules of the Classroom: Remote Teaching in the Age of Covid-19

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

Celebrating the makers, creators and coders who shine.

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