Hello everyone!
Not much is happening at the Smart Doll Land right now, because Mr. Choo and the team are in the US. So let’s focus on the Solar Marine project!
This time I have some substantial news about Discord notifications and the Inventory Tracker.
Discord
After X and Telegram, notifications from Solar Marine are available on Discord, too! Moreover, you can get the same notifications on your Discord server.
I wrote a very detailed article how to do it, so head over there if you’re a Discord user.
Inventory Tracker
Our initial version of the Inventory Tracker just works but it’s a UX disaster and looks like my grandma’s „HTML for beginners” homework. I couldn’t stand it anymore so I made a new version that looks and feels way better.
The new tracker is now just one of the dashboards available at the Solar Marine insights hub.
I added a couple of new ones:
- Inventory → Change Timeline: Displays most recent changes in stock, whether the quantity goes down (orders) or up (restocks and cancellations). It’s very helpful when you want to know when any item was last ordered or restocked. Or to see what others were buying recently. Or to find all products that were recently restocked (and by how many).
- Inventory → Change Totals: Summary of inventory changes in the selected period. Total changes (up and down) for each product. You can check, for example, which doll was most popular recently.
More dashboards and insights are coming soon.
Some tech yapping (feel free to skip)
Solar Marine insights hub is built with Observable Framework. I decided to use it for a few reasons:
- It is mostly the frontend for the data. You can feed it data from all kinds of sources, but you don’t have to try to fit your data into predefined, inflexible models. I can keep the backend as is.
- It looks modern and clean from the box. I’m extremely rusty in web design, so I’m really happy that everything looks decent without me even trying.
- It builds static pages. Which means it’s easy on my webhosting and blazing fast for you at the same time.
- It’s open-source and self-hosted.