Introducing the Slack Pack From Postlight Labs

There was once a time when people got excited about office parties and gathering around the water cooler to talk with their colleagues. But in the past few years, we’ve been challenged with cultivating a work culture that relies heavily on asynchronous communication, largely through Slack. And as our conversations become more digitized, personality, clarity, and fun can get lost in the fray.

Here at Postlight Labs, we’ve been revitalizing some of our handiest products for Slack, providing more features to continue a culture of fun and effective communication. We hope you try them out, and let us know what you think!

Dash

When you need to get a team together in Slack to communicate about a new project, you would typically create an official new channel. Or maybe you can get away with a group DM for shorter engagements. But what happens when you have a project that falls in between the two? We created Dash to address just that. 

When you need to quickly align a team, Dash allows you to create a temporary, timed channel. Once the Dash channel is created, the clock starts ticking. This provides a common goal for the work that needs to be done as well as a clear deadline for the channel itself. If you need more or less time, the channel creator can end the channel and mark the task as completed or extend the deadline.

We recently added a feature that will now send a message 10 minutes, one day, or one week before the channel’s deadline making it easier for the channel creator to set reminders for themselves to check in and avoid being caught by surprise when the deadline is near. This new feature allows for seamless management of the channel, giving you and your team more time to actually work on the task at hand, with efficient collaboration, as opposed to stressing over the tooling to do so. In fact, we use it for each of our Postlight Insights articles in flight.

Textmoji

As people have migrated to a more asynchronous workspace on Slack, we lean heavily on emoji reactions, but only so many come by default with Slack. Enter Textmoji — a tool to help you create custom text emojis quickly and easily. It’s a web app built upon the Svelte framework and utilizing Pixi.js to handle the canvas manipulation (AKA editing the emoji and seeing it in a preview window). All you have to do is choose or edit a template, enter your text, and you’re done!

Over the past few months, we’ve given the app a little TLC and are happy to share version 2.0! We streamlined the user experience by narrowing down the presets and giving the user the ability to randomize them at will for a burst of inspiration and creativity. The next time you want to make an obscure reference emoji or simply a nice “NP!” option, try out Textmoji!

Parser

Postlight Reader is one of our most popular products used by millions of people around the world. It’s an extension that removes the ads from articles around the web and leaves only what matters: the content. Postlight Parser is a serverless Slack bot that uses the Postlight Reader parser, allowing you to translate the in-web experience to Slack. 

You can share a full article free from ads and clutter directly in your Slack channel. If your colleagues also use Postlight Reader, Parser will keep their experience consistent if you share an article with them in Slack. It also makes the content searchable within Slack, so if you ever need to reference any of the articles you have shared, you can simply search for the article with a keyword. 

Give ‘em a try!

It’s easy to get bogged down in inefficient workarounds to solve some of the shortcomings of communicating on Slack. We hope you try out our Slack Pack, smooth out a workflow or two, and even have some fun. If you have any feedback on Dash, Textmoji, or Postlight Parser, please reach out!

Malcolm Peterson (he/him) is an Associate Engineer at Postlight. Say hello at malcolm.peterson@postlight.com.