new feature: subscriptions

[aristeinberg]

this allows you to subscribe to a voter. this way, we can email our users and keep them at least a little engaged. the call to action when we are more than a month before the action feels pretty weak otherwise. this will also give us a little bit of a signal into how seriously people are using the product and potentially could even help us track some sense of impact.

would welcome feedback both on the implementation and the product.

on the implementation: yes, i just wound up rolling my own js dialog, because i didn't have a strong opinion about libraries and googling revealed a bunch of libraries that looked really amateur-ish, or really nice ones that probably would necessitate a larger UI re-write.

i am currently using sendgrid to send the emails with a sendgrid api key that corresponds to my own account. i see we have some environment variables for sendgrid username/password in heroku but not 100% sure what email address those correspond to. and of course we'll want to improve the UI for the email and match whatever disclaimers VoteAmerica needs to display.

on the product: probably could use some work making this more attractive. we don't really sell the value-prop of subscribing at all. welcome any thoughts about how to do that effectively.

things that remain unimplemented:

• there is no "account" state preserved across requests. each time you want to subscribe, you need to re-type in your email address. if you reload the page, there's no evidence that you have already subscribed successfully.
• if your friend is not yet in the database at all (e.g. they did not vote early in the general and have not yet had their mail ballot application processed), there's no way to subscribe to them.
• ideally, the emails should highlight/track what has changed since you subscribed/last received an email.