
Silvrback is now open to everyone – high-quality, Markdown-powered blogging - dsowers
https://dsowers.silvrback.com/silvrback-is-now-open-to-everyone
======
kbd
Looks very nice. I'd actually consider using this.

Questions:

* I like that you support tags. How do you browse tags?

* Customizable URL slugs: so if I want to date my archive URLs I have to manually type in '/archive/2013/10/07/slug' each time? Is there any way to template the archive URLs?

* How does your archive page scale when you have thousands of posts? [https://dsowers.silvrback.com/archive](https://dsowers.silvrback.com/archive)

* As others have mentioned, I'd really prefer a free trial than shell out money (I understand it's not much) and feel like I wasted it if I poke around for a few minutes and find it's not for me.

* I had a question about exporting data but someone already asked it :)

* "Your homepage... will show the latest three posts in full." Is this customizable? I often have a bunch of short posts that mostly serve to keep track of stuff I read and find it later. I'd rather show the last, say, week's worth of content instead of a fixed number of posts.

* Full text search?

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PaulHoule
I want to have my blog on a custom domain name... How do I set up my DNS to
point at your system?

~~~
dsowers
Just click on "custom domain" in settings and it has instructions for you. If
you need extra help, just send me an email.

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Karunamon
Question - is there an export option included? A cursory glance around the
pages doesn't turn anything up.

I've had to stage an emergency exodus of blog content from third party hosts
more than once because reasons (most recently: Thanks OVH billing
department!), so having content in a non-exportable site scares me a little,
especially when I'll be using that site as my primary writing area.

~~~
lelandbatey
Could you explain what happened with OVH? I currently have a couple of servers
with them, and if there's something I should be wary of, I'd like to know.

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Karunamon
I doubt this is something affecting a bunch of other people, but I lost a
dedicated server there through a combination of my own ignorance, a dodgy spam
filter, and their strange billing policies (instead of charging you month to
month, they generate an invoice you have to log in to pay).

I hadn't touched this server in weeks, so they generated their invoice, the
notification email got filed away as spam, and the server was disconnected
(again the message being filed as spam).

It wasn't until almost a week after that I noticed something was up and called
them. They advised me to open a ticket, I did, one day later the server
disappeared from their control panel, and I have yet to receive a reply on
that ticket.

The missing the billing and their messages getting spam filtered is completely
on me, but the not answering a ticket and linking ticket-creating-account-ness
the payment status of the server is totally on them.

Back to Hetzner, it seems. I didn't lose anything but my blog (which is
Octopress and thankfully backed up to Bitbucket) and a couple of VMs I used
for learning things.

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seltzered_
Just to throw my 2 cents in, I recently switched from octopress to using
silvrback at [http://vivekgani.com](http://vivekgani.com) \- here's why:

\- I work part-time as a contractor, and part-time on my side project. While I
have a ton of blog design ideas, I lost a personal bet that I'd have them done
by the end of September.

\- I have had lots of posts backlogged over the past several months. I was
starting to have a fear of posting due to the design of my older site.

\- Octopress is wonderful, but to use it right you really need to be familiar
with tagging your repos correctly / using a separate repo for your posts. I
didn't want to think about all this in addition to all my usual pickiness
about the front-end design.

\- I really didn't want to fiddle with wordpress. This is a personal blog, not
something I plan to delegate to other content writers.

\- As glennf and others have mentioned, I didn't want to use medium, or any
other free site. I want my own domain to be used, and occasionally look at
google analytics.

So far, I'm happy with silvrback. Liking how it properly scales images when I
use refer to them within a list, Markdown is the first class citizen, and
psychologically I'm not thinking too hard about blog design for now. Yes,
there's some UX annoyances with the initial release of silvrback, but I'm sure
Damian's working on them.

Will I still be using it in couple years? Maybe not, but for a site that's
only got a couple posts and already gotten a couple thousand visits and
mentions from sites like hackaday & packlite.tumblr in the past week I'm happy
enough with it.

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wyck
Why would anyone choose a closed source blog platform in this day and age,
this is a serious question I truly don't understand why.

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jokull
It’s markdown so migrating is easy.

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wyck
So this site disappears one day or is sold..markdown is irrelevant, since you
do not control your data. There is plenty of markdown enabled open source blog
software.

~~~
jokull
Fair point.

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jenius
Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and offer
a refund if they don't like it. I wonder if this strategy will net you more or
less sales. My gut tells me that it will be less, because more people will be
driven away by the fact that they can't even test it before paying, but who
knows, really. Might be an interesting thing to A/B test and write about the
results.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and
> offer a refund if they don 't like it._

Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.

You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card
surcharge", for example.

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lowmagnet
Already up and running on this. Thanks Damian!

I really like this layout compared to doing it myself with Octopress. It's
much more convenient to have most of the decisions made for me because I tend
to get into optimization paralysis.

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hawkharris
Is a hosted blogging site the best way to "own your own brand"?

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dsowers
I'm using this phrase to contrast Silvrback with other content publishing
sites such as Medium and Svbtle, which don't give you nearly as much freedom
and ownership.

~~~
hawkharris
I understand your point and think it's not a bad line from a marketing
standpoint, but the concept may not click with the intended audience.

Based on the app's features, I would say the audience is composed of tech-
savvy developers / designers who want a lot of control over their content and
want to establish their own brand.

I think many of those people will be inclined to blog on their own websites,
where they can do all the hacking they want. Blogs are easy to establish,
especially if you're shooting for a minimalistic feel.

Having said all this, I wonder if there's a way to make Silvrback available as
a service that people can apply to their own sites? ...I'll admit that
business isn't my strong suit, but I think this would be a great way to go if
it can be made financially viable.

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oellegaard
I just signed up and migrated (manually, as there doesn't seem to be any way
to import stuff) my blog from tumblr.

[http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/](http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/)
vs [http://blog.kristian.io/](http://blog.kristian.io/)

To be honest, I think it is a bit too minimal. With the tagline "own your
brand", I find it strange that the site is completely white and generic - what
exactly is my brand then? Not even my name or picture is in the header.

I was also hoping for the posibility to write a synopsis for each blog
article, as I some very long and technical articles that I don't want to be
displayed in its full length on the front page. This unfortunately isn't
possible.

Furhtermore, I find the menu thing extremely strange. It took me a while to
discover it and I don't think it's very user friendly.

I have to say that if the above things are not fixed, I don't think I would
want to move my blog at all. Fortunately I signed up for the monthly plan.

Edit: Also, it would be cool to let me store the markdown documents in
Dropbox, so I could use a proper editor (and also for import/export).

~~~
dsowers
Hey oellagaard. When you say, "I was also hoping for the possibility to write
a synopsis for each blog article", where would you want that synopsis to show
up? In the archive? Just curious about this idea. (I'm taking feature
requests). Sorry if you find it to be too minimal and don't like the menu. I
guess everyone has different tastes. I like your idea about storing the docs
in dropbox.

~~~
oellegaard
I'd love for it to show up on the home page. Since some of my blog posts get a
bit long, it would be cool to write a small synopsis of each article to let me
user scroll through a few articles on the home page, without reading through
the entirety of all each blog post.

I think it would be really cool if you could use the header from the bio page,
for the rest of the site as well - then I think it would be less anonymous,
e.g.:
[http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/bio](http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/bio)

In the end the menu isn't a big problem - but I would really like the
opportunity to put my name or a blog name on the top of the page.

~~~
dsowers
You actually can do this: "I think it would be really cool if you could use
the header from the bio page, for the rest of the site as well - then I think
it would be less anonymous, e.g.:"

In "Settings," there is a field called "short bio sentence." This bio sentence
will show up next to your name on every post.

I'm still playing around with different home page variations. I will consider
your request (or give people more options for their homepage). I'll let you
know.

~~~
oellegaard
I wasn't thinking about the short bio sentence, what I want on the top of the
page is
[http://c.kristian.io/image/2b3X1P2y1Z3R](http://c.kristian.io/image/2b3X1P2y1Z3R)
;)

I think it would be cool with a few variations or options.

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tech-no-logical
Yet another blogging platform for which I need to use 'ctrl -', resulting in a
content-width of less than 600 pixels, which looks ridiculous on a modern
monitor.

I still don't get the 'large print' trend. Yes, I've read all the so-called
'pro's', but the content still looks ridiculously sparse to me.

~~~
nilliams
Always surprised when I see comments like this. I have the opposite view. The
font size of both the OP site (and Medium) is perfect for me and I wish more
sites would depart from the web's 'tiny text' mistakes of the past.

I find a website with 'old-fashioned' 12px or lower text is like me holding my
iPhone at arm's length. Don't get it.

Curious as to your monitor size/res and whether you use the computer leaning
forwards/backwards. I'm a 28yr old with good eyesight, I lean back in my
chair.

Also wonder if a lot of hackers are biased towards small text because they're
used to their IDEs/terminals which default to pretty tiny fonts.

~~~
tericho
I'm not advocating the re-emergence of 12px text but the body text for
Silvrback is 22px with 1.5 line-height. Medium is 1.45 and I believe 1.2 is
_normal_. I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

~~~
nilliams
>> I believe 1.2 is normal

It's the default in browsers and what the 'normal' keyword means yes, but I
don't think it's a good default, any more than the default font-size is. I
think 1.5 is a pretty common recommendation in the world of typography. I
don't really have any good references to back that up, but if you Google '1.5
line height best practice' there's some reading to be had (realise that's a
highly scientific approach)!

>> I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

Is that a problem? Perhaps they got it right with children's books. :) Is it
comfortable on your eyes?

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yarou
This looks really nice. What are the advantages compared to some comparable
blogging platforms out there? Couldn't I just use Octopress or Github Pages to
achieve similar functionality?

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otterley
If you'd like to get even more speed, ensure your assets are minified,
compressed and cacheable, and served directly from the filesystem if possible.
There aren't any Cache-Control: or Expires: headers for those. It took nearly
1.5 seconds to retrieve [https://dsowers.silvrback.com/assets/application-
cb034c94e2b...](https://dsowers.silvrback.com/assets/application-
cb034c94e2bea7e99bb5eaef37b8e646.js), and time to first byte was 634ms.

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lcnmrn
Silvrback is really nice and interesting. Why not reimagine publishing from
the ground up using Markdown syntax?

This is what we're trying to do with
[http://markdawn.com/](http://markdawn.com/). The reason I'm leaving a comment
here is that the app is not ready for a “Show HN” yet (or maybe it's just a
designer/engineer complex for not doing that at this time).

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nigekelly
Looks great. Need to check it out. Do you do all the rss and sitemap stuff
too? Any features to help promote posts or drive SEO?

~~~
jasonlotito
For a simple review, I wrote up my initial experience with Silvrback, after
migrating over a blog from WordPress.

[http://jasonlotito.com/over-the-us](http://jasonlotito.com/over-the-us)

I should note that I've been very happy with Silvrback. It's easy to use,
fast, and works as expected.

~~~
eCa
There's a

    
    
      Silvrback © 2013
    

at the bottom of the page of your post that I'm not should be there?

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dsowers
You have full ownership over your data. I didn't mean for that copyright to
suggest anything else and I'm removing it asap.

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astrojams
It looks good. How does it differ from Ghost?

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dsowers
Ghost requires installation and tinkering (plugins, themes, etc). Silvrback is
designed to give you something that looks great and doesn't take up your time.
I believe that people shouldn't spend any time building a personal blog. You
should spend that time on your products instead.

I could be wrong, but I think Silvrback probably has much better syntax
highlighting than Ghost (do they have it at all?) and it gives you a bio page
so you can consolidate your brand.

~~~
wyck
Ghost is also open source, much like a lot of blog software. Syntax
highlighting is mostly irrelevant due to most platforms using 3rd party
bundles like prettify,Syntaxhighlighter, etc.

I'll take having an open source, easy to install, fully controllable platform
over closed any day of the week, especially for something simple like a blog
platform, and blogs are not about products unless that is what you consider
yourself.

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YorickPeterse
Is there a way to see the available colour schemes _without_ having to pay any
money? Having created a colour scheme that's also called "Autumn" I'm
wondering if it in this case would be mine or somebody else's (probably the
latter).

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SnootyMonkey
I'm also a very happy early Silvrback customer. It's fast, simple, attractive,
and very easy to setup with your own domain: [http://self-
proficient.com/](http://self-proficient.com/)

~~~
davidcollantes
Everything is fast when you only have one post. :-)

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swanson
I really like the look of the bio page - might have to redo my own blog
template :)

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IsraGS
I just opened an account and get really dissapointed when I found that your
Logo (silvrback) it's all over my blog. We are already paying for your
service, there is no need to put your logo all over OUR blog.

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egonschiele
This looks really cool, so I'll sound like an ass for saying this, but: for
$6.99 / month, what do I get over a free blogging solution?

> Full ownership of your brand and data.

This is the only thing not provided by anyone else afaik.

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awsm
It looks interesting but if it can't be self hosted. I'm out.

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onebaddude
That's a great logo.

~~~
dsowers
Thanks.

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shahalpk
Looks like a medium-svbtle hybrid. Nice effort.

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jj808
Are there any customization/theme options? Or is every Silvrback blog going to
look the exact same?

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Doctor_Fegg
Is there anywhere I can actually try out the editor before signing up?

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roarroar
What do the Markdown people think of things like NML:
([http://genius.cat-v.org/erik-naggum/xml-sgml-nml-
lisp](http://genius.cat-v.org/erik-naggum/xml-sgml-nml-lisp))? Isn't this a
much nicer way of working with HTML (especially with macros)? The syntax
described in the link is compact and elegant, whereas markdown is smallish but
basically ad hoc.

