Spinal July update: GitHub app is here (finally!)

Hey there! Not interested in receiving the monthly Spinal updates anymore? Unsubscribe here. 😊

In this email: 
- 3 minutes reading time 
- 3246 characters 
- 519 words 
- 21 emojis

And yet another month has passed. ☀️ Welcome to another email full with some great new things that have landed in Spinal!

As always: welcome to all the new people! Great to have you. 🙌

Currently battling some issues with how content is shown in between editor-modes. Please bear with me as I’m working on getting this sorted. 😓

So, let’s quickly get to it. What’s new in Spinal. 👇

🐱 GitHub app #

One of the most requested features from existing ánd almost-customers. 😅 When I launched Spinal ~520 days ago, the quickest way to launch was with GitHub’s oAuth setup. It worked great and it brought Spinal to where it is today.

But it came with some big downsides. For one it gave full access to all your repositories. And secondly the person who authorised was added as the commiter for all your published content.

For the first problem I’ve always suggested to create a separate user that would have limited access to repos and authorise Spinal with this new user. This worked, but not many would do this as it’s too much hassle. You have a business to run!

So I’m happy to announce Spinal’s GitHub app. It fixes both above problems. Thus: much saver and it looks better in your commit log too! 🤓

For more details check out this blog, including how you can switch if you use the legacy GitHub set up (legacy access will be removed the first of September 2023). 🤙

🏘️ Group content #

After a beta period with a dozen customers: it’s now available to all! Group your content by frontmatter key. It’s such a delightful improvement to have your content mimic your static site. At Spinal I’ve enabled it on our docs to group by the section frontmatter.

💡 Pro-tip: you can re-order your groups by dragging/dropping.

Read the details in the docs.

⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts #

Next to the Global Command Menu you can now also navigate your Spinal dashboard with Keyboard shortcuts. Type ? in the app to see all available options.

💡💡 Another pro-tip: type [ to hide/show the navigation to have a gorgeous focussed writing experience. 🧘‍♀️

From the blog 👓 #

5 Time-saving writing tools your team needs to know about, from blank slate to published with Spinal.
Guide to building a knowledge base with a static site generator; the beauty of running a static site; you can use it for all your content instead or relying on many third-party tools.
Reminder: do you run an agency and want to use Spinal with your customers? There are some sweet discounts waiting for you.

🐭 Smaller new things and improvements #

There are some useful smaller things introduced as well (alongside some bugfixing and behind the scenes work).

Personal plan’s limits have increased, it’s now: 3 content types and a content limit of 1000 📈. For a limited for just an one-time payment of $99. Price will increase to $149 (one-time) 1st of August.
Add an image right from the toolbar instead of switching context and dropping/pasting an image. 🖼️
This is really just for a handful of ex-customers: you can now access the customer portal. Useful to download previous invoices. 🧾
Tweaked the link field in the formatting toolbar. Less “jumping around”. 🐸

And that’s it for this month. Some really great new things (and some truly exciting things coming up too, think “workflow” 🤫)! What do you hope to read next month? Let me know. Spinal is built for you and I push features up based on customer feedback.

See you next month and thanks for being a Spinal customer! 🏆

—Eelco, founder Spinal