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Val Town Newsletter 11

Date
July 31, 2023
Author
Steven Krouse

This month we shipped autosave, comments, email a val, an expanded API, and dozens more features, big and small. We’re hiring a full time engineer in NYC and a part-time docs writer. We were featured on a couple of podcasts and newsletters, and y’all tweeted some really cool vals.

We’re hiring!

We’re also hiring someone to help with docs and community part-time and remote.

Come work with us! Email me at steve@val.town if you’re interested.

Podcasts

I did a bit of a podcast tour over the last month, and it was a lot of fun!

Changelog

Autosave vals

Vals now autosave in localstorage, so you can fearlessly leave the tab without losing your work.

Comments on vals

You can now write helpful and constructive comments on vals!

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Last runs preview

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Trigger vals via email

Now you can send an email to a val to trigger it to run. Each val gets its own email address: username.valname@valtown.email. The val gets passed the email data as the first argument. Try it out by sending an email to stevekrouse.testEmail2@valtown.email to trigger this val:

Expanded API

We quietly released the first expansion of our API to let you list & search vals and users. Nico and Achille from our community were quick to release a zod client, which works on Val Town.

What can I do with Val Town?

https://www.val.town/examples/use-cases

Testimonials

https://www.val.town/#testimonials

Tailored Guides

We customize your initial home screen with content related to the answers you gave during your onboarding.

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Redesigned tips & feedback

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Misc

  • View all the vals you liked
  • Disable-able code transformations (in preferences)
  • Types
  • Social links (in preferences)
  • More fetch proxies (now you can fetch from .gov!)
  • Welcome email (that you send yourself in the onboarding tutorial via console.email!)
  • Link to a prefilled new val editor (example)
  • The limit on val sizes is 250kb for pro users
  • Upgraded to Deno 1.35.0
  • Better error messages on the Run API
  • Improved output types of api
  • Placeholder text in new val editor
  • Type acquisition from esm.sh
  • Polishes to our quick-search component
  • Full text searches README content
  • Polishes to the new val editor
  • View trending scheduled vals

Roadmap

  • Notifications (errors, likes, references, forks, etc)
  • Fork Vals (in a first-class, semantic way where we track this in the database)
  • Expanded API (to power a VS Code extension & more!)
  • Discord bot tutorials and guides
  • Improvements to embedded vals
  • Public folders
  • Val version pinning
  • Integrated LLMs (have AI write your vals for you)
  • More web-standard and JS compatibility

Cool tweets X’s