
Open for everyone - bradgessler
http://blog.svbtle.com/open-for-everyone
======
DigitalSea
Dustin is a little too late on this one. Medium came along and scooped up
whatever chance Svbtle had of becoming accepted by the masses. It should have
been open from the start, Dustin's elitist attitude got in the way and I think
it's only a matter of time before Svbtle dies.

~~~
pg
If you pick software based on your opinion of the attitude of the authors,
rather than its actual qualities, you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

Do you have any opinion about Svbtle itself, incidentally? Have you tried
using it? What do you feel are its advantages and disadvantages compared to
Medium?

~~~
DigitalSea
I would like to clarify my comment as some people has misinterpreted what I
actually meant. I think Svbtle is great, but at the same time, how is it any
different to that of other blog platforms that tout themselves as having a
clean interface for writing content? We have Medium, Ghost, Tumblr and even
Quora. The competitive edge that Svbtle had was its exclusivity, an edge
they've now lost by opening it up.

I wasn't attacking Dustin Curtis, I don't know him, I know of him and I have
no problem with him whatsoever. I think people are too quick when it comes to
interpreting the intent of someone else's words. But that's understandable as
gauging intent of words without the voice can be very difficult and easy to
misinterpret, especially on the Internet and a site like Hacker News.

What I meant by elitist was a blogging platform that only allowed people that
Dustin or whoever else hand-picked and determined were good enough to be
allowed to use and publish on the Svbtle platform is in my opinion quite an
elitist thing to do. "I think you're good enough to use my website" it's like
a tech company like Apple choosing who gets to use their products and who
doesn't based on how they look or where they live.

At the same time, it's Dustin's right to choose who uses Svbtle, it was a
unique take on blogging when it made its debut and its his darling. I won't
judge him for it, but I standby my choice of words calling his approach an
elitist attitude. That's just my opinion, don't hate on me for it.

I haven't used Svbtle long enough to form a substantial opinion as I already
use Medium and am active on Quora, but what I've seen is quite nice. The
interface is great, I've always been a fan of the overall aesthetic of the
site from day one. I've got nothing bad to say about it. It's just another
blogging platform to me, a well-built one.

However, I don't think Svbtle has any competitive edge left to compete with
other established players in the competitive blogging platform niche. It's an
overdone thing, even Ghost has failed to live up to its own hype as a blogging
platform because people are used to the likes of Wordpress and don't want to
use something new and unknown. Perhaps if Svbtle were to open source itself
like Wordpress they might be able to compete in the space.

I believe my comment was mostly fair, I am sorry if I offended anyone, but
honesty is the best policy. If I called Dustin Curtis a fat elitist slob then
maybe all of the disdain in the comments beneath me would be warranted.

~~~
prezjordan
> Dustin's elitist attitude

> I wasn't attacking Dustin Curtis, I don't know him, I know of him and I have
> no problem with him whatsoever

Not sure how this could be interpreted in any other way whatsoever. Your other
points are very fair.

~~~
jessedhillon
Elitism doesn't need to carry any sort of value judgment. You don't allow
homeless people in your house, do you? That makes you elitist for a slightly
broader definition -- you share the company of employed/housed people only.
What else do you call a policy of only allowing hand-chosen authors to use a
platform you've publicly touted? Selective, I suppose.

There's also the matter of Dustin Curtis' negative reaction to the creation of
WP themes and other Svbtle lookalikes, which many people felt was
undue/misplaced.

------
mijustin
_Open for everyone_

My first question is: "who is this for?"

The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling
out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't
control?

Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I
couldn't tell from the blog post.

I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about
our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product
is _for_.

~~~
minimaxir
It's for the intersection of people a) who want a blog and b) who want a
website with a good design.

Medium beat Svbtle to the punch, though.

~~~
cliveowen
Medium wants you to have a Twitter account.

~~~
650REDHAIR
Wouldn't most modern writers have a Twitter account anyway? If you're
publishing your piece online wouldn't you want everyone to see it?

~~~
cliveowen
If you already have an audience, maybe, but if you don't, then it's just an
avoidable restriction.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _an avoidable restriction_ //

How does having an account restrict you, in the context of being a writer
wishing to publicise your work?

~~~
lucian1900
It restricts Medium to people with Twitter accounts. Contrary to popular
belief, not everyone has one.

~~~
Touche
You can get them for free, using a throwaway email and fake identity if
wanted. Why is it preferable to get a Medium account?

~~~
lucian1900
Because you'd have to deal with one less party (trust, security, reliability,
support).

If you aren't already a Twitter user, it's simpler to have the option of
making a Medium account.

~~~
BlackDeath3
If given the choice between two options, ceteris paribus, I'd choose the one
without the Twitter account restriction as well.

------
ForHackernews
Oh thank god! Before this, I had nowhere to post all my brilliant thoughts
except medium, blogger, wordpress, posthaven, quora, facebook, google+,
livejournal and myspace.

~~~
nathancahill
Don't forget Obtvse! [0]

[0] [https://github.com/natew/obtvse2](https://github.com/natew/obtvse2)

~~~
coherentpony
So 'acvte' is still up for grabs?

Also, did you really just index your citations by zero? :)

~~~
henrik_w
Can't resist to add this: “Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise
of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-
Bootle

~~~
coherentpony
Relevant:
[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831....](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html)

------
minimaxir
_Svbtle’s dashboard is designed to work the same way your brain works. It
encourages you to dump ideas, links, and thoughts into a flow of draft posts,
and then makes it easy to slowly sculpt those ideas into publishable articles.
It just feels natural._

This isn't the type of marketing copy that makes me want to use the product,
and in-fact drives me away from it. Contrast with Medium's more neutral,
objective copy:
[https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04](https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04)

~~~
cshenoy
Why does the copy drive you away from it? Serious question since I didn't
think one way or the other about it.

~~~
wpietri
I don't feel it as strongly as minimaxir apparently does, but the copy bugged
me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's
impressed with itself and encourages you to be impressed with yourself as
well.

Personally, I prefer a more matter-of-fact approach. The less bullshit I get
in a marketing pitch, the less I worry that they need to bullshit me to cover
up for issues I haven't yet discovered. But then, I'm not in Svbtle's target
market; I'm very unlikely to use a hosted platform to publish.

~~~
jessaustin
_...the copy bugged me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core
audience do. It 's impressed with itself..._

Definitely! Having just got back from watching the X Games, the comparison
that springs to mind is that this sort of thing bugs me the way any opinion
column published in any Aspen CO newspaper bugs me. "When I think about how
perceptive and fortunate I am to have chosen to live in such a wonderful
community..."

~~~
hippee-lee
Maybe it's a Colorado thing? It reminds me of the same coffee shop
conversation I used to overhear: 'I just love living in Boulder, it's so
diverse.' Said by white person to other white person on a day I went only saw
white people on the way to the office with all white people before I went home
to a largely white community.

I'm sure they were great people and I loved my neighborhood in the suburbs but
it and Boulder were anything but diverse from an ethic or cultural point of
view.

------
XERQ
The level of dismissiveness I'm seeing in the comments here is really
discouraging, and I'm disappointed to be a part of this community. In a
community of startup founders fostering new ideas, I haven't seen such close-
mindedness. I appreciate what dcurtis is trying to do, doesn't matter if I
agree with it or not.

The kudos concept is different, the fact that people are writing him emails
and tweets about decrementing their counts for a meaningless number is petty.

The "Elitism" invite-only being such an issue is silly. HN and reddit started
with small groups of people that weren't connected to a larger social sphere,
so they slowly grew organically with the content they wanted. Google does
invite-only for their projects (Gmail, G+, etc) as a way to both fix issues
early with minimal user impact and to scale properly. Medium did the same
thing. To say the dcurtis should've made it open for everyone at the beginning
is disingenuous. Curating a small community and taking feedback from them,
along with having readers connected to a larger social sphere (HN) means it
can grow slowly while focusing on its core users, especially as a side
project.

Appreciate what others are doing, even if you don't agree with it. Don't
follow the herd. Just because Medium opened its gates doesn't mean they're the
end-all be-all of blogging. I made a svbtle account because I want to see how
they evolve and capture what Medium is missing.

~~~
gone35
It's conscientiousness, not close-mindedness.

If you find petty that people complain about non-intended kudos, by the same
logic you should also find petty to have introduced such a pointless anti-
pattern in the first place.

Besides, kudos are not that different from karma points or likes. Knowingly
adulterating such a crucial signaling component of an online community is
short-sighted and needlessly detrimental.

------
orblivion
I did not mean to give you a Kudo. I don't care for that button interface.
Unless I can undo it, then I like it.

~~~
plorkyeran
It's interesting how much such an utterly irrelevant thing annoys me. There's
really no reason why accidentally making a number increase by one should
matter, but I suppose it's the fact that the site is falsely representing it
as a deliberate action by me.

~~~
roryokane
There isn’t “really no reason” why it’s annoying; it’s exactly as you said:
the site is falsely representing your upvote as a deliberate action. And your
action changes a number, labeled “kudos”, seen by all future visitors to the
page, so your action ends up implying endorsement of the page to future
visitors. That’s why the kudos feature annoys me – it falsely represents the
page to be popular, but rather than just completely making up a number of
kudos like a normal liar, it ties the number of kudos to the actions of
unwitting page visitors. That gives the author plausible deniability that it’s
_possible_ that that many people really did like the page, though in fact that
is very unlikely.

------
quadrangle
"Open" for use but not for inspection / modification / sharing… It's like all
sorts of SaaS: it's a lock-in, a jail, that is open for you to enter. Ok,
that's a bit harsh. But still, we've got lots of good tools like this, we
don't need another proprietary thing. It looks nice though, would be useful if
it were fully FLOSS.

~~~
debacle
Don't blame svbtle. It's the monetization strategy of the Internet, and has
been for 20 years.

~~~
Karunamon
I can and do blame them for (apparently) not having an export function.

~~~
icebraining
They do offer a way of exporting, and in a standard format: an Atom feed. Any
blog engine worth its salt should allow you to import them.

~~~
Karunamon
Not quite the same.

The atom feed will represent the compiled and rendered end content. If I have,
say, source code snippets, that leaves me in a position of needing to parse
out the original code so I can redo it in whatever new highlighting syntax my
new blog uses. I might end up with resized images instead of originals, etc
etc etc. It's not a real substitute for a proper backend export.

This is why I'm such a huge fan of Octopress and nothing has been able to pull
me away from it. Everything's in a git repo. Backups are one command. All my
original text is safe in Markdown format.

It might not look as cool as Medium or Svbtle, or have all the features, but
it's relatively easy to use, and more importantly immune to platform lock-in.

~~~
icebraining
Fair enough. I actually use a static blog generator myself (Pelican[1]), but I
write so rarely that I hadn't considered those issues.

[1] [http://blog.getpelican.com/](http://blog.getpelican.com/)

------
state
What about this should compel me to give all my content to someone else? I
understand the argument that they're entering in to a crowded space, and I see
how they believe that they're the best.

But really, I'm just going to put all my stuff on someone else's servers and
wait for them to be acquired and shut down? It is 2014 after all. How many
times has this happened?

~~~
ianbicking
The custom domain is probably the best escape hatch, and an advantage over
Medium – ultimately you keep ownership of the pointer that is your brand, and
that lets you really move your content (even if there is no export yet).

------
lhnz
Anybody else get invited a few weeks back and now feel the pang of no longer
being in an exclusive club? I need a hug.

Aside: I think this is a great blogging platform that turns quite a few people
away because of Dustin's bravado.

~~~
minimaxir
In my case, the "exclusive club" of "thought leaders" itself turned me away
from Svbtle.

------
vph
I hate blogs without dates. A good blog article is dated properly when it was
created and revised. If you want to promote a _new_ blog platform, better date
your blogs properly.

~~~
mikeg8
I emailed Dustin about providing more emphasis on dates just yesterday and
this was the response I got.

> We want to encourage people to write stuff that has lasting impact. I think
> dates can just add an extra piece of messy context for some articles. What
> kind of increased emphasis do you want to see?

The more I though about it, the more I realized my desire to see dates is
because that is what I know. In retrospect, the best writings I've read didn't
need date information to make them impactful and I admire Svbtle more for
standing out this way.

~~~
vph
I completely disagree with this point of view. I often feel that many blog
articles intentionally leave out dates because they want to feel "fresh" or
they pretend that they came up with some great ideas first or they want the
convenience/unaccountability of fixing mistakes in previous revisions. And
that is a cheating. If your ideas are fresh and timeless, they will speak for
themselves.

Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are
timeless.

Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.

------
dsowers
If svbtle isn't quite right for you, check out Silvrback:
[https://www.silvrback.com/](https://www.silvrback.com/)

It's similar to svbtle in its simplicity.

~~~
loteck
Pretty happy Silvrback user here, but I do kind of miss the "quick idea"
interface from svbtle (wp version in my case).

How well has Silvrback held up under heavy load?

~~~
dsowers
Silvrback performs well under stress. It's setup to autoscale when a traffic
surge is detected so the platform can easily handle articles making the front
page of HN. Unicorn and memcached also really help.

------
aroman
Honestly, when Svbtle first came out, I thought it was really cool and I
wanted to use it.

Now I use Medium and I have no interest in it — and most people I know (who
blog) do the same these days.

~~~
mikeg8
I have been using svtble for a few months now and when asked by a friend how
it is different from Medium, I created an account on Medium to see for myself.
I personally prefer svbtle's dashboard as I feel it's much smoother than
Medium with the flow of: idea > draft > published. Svbtle is also less focused
on images and commenting. These small details are preferable to me but to each
his own.

~~~
snirp
When I checked out Medium, they had no Markdown support and very limited
formatting options. Not good for code examples. Also no option to use your own
domain.

Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. All in all it
seems like a better option to me.

~~~
aroman
_> Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle._

Why?

------
javert
Instead of svbtle, they should have named it pretentiovs.

------
joelrunyon
Wasn't part of svbtle's appeal being one of the few people to "have a svbtle"?
When it first came out - it was beautiful & part of the cache was that only a
few people got in.

It was super popular for a few months - then fell off completely. Seems
strange that the one main differentiator for the network has now been removed.

~~~
GnarfGnarf
"catch" or "cachet"

~~~
joelrunyon
Sorry - caché

------
heywire
Am I the only one annoyed by the spelling of the site? I can't figure out if
it is a misspelled "subtle" or Silicon Valley Beetle or something... How is it
pronounced?

~~~
nostromo
In Latin they wrote V for what we today would pronounce U.

During the American Renaissance, architects used the old latin alphabet, which
had no U. That's why you see things like PVBLIC LIBRARY in old cities. Eg:
[http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg)

So, "Svbtle" is "Subtle" and "Bvlgari" is "Bulgari" etc.

U and V have a long complicated history. If you'd like to learn more:
[http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv....](http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv.htm)

~~~
heywire
Ah, that makes much more sense... especially considering the site. Thanks!

------
imwhimsical
I got "invited" to svbtle a year and a half ago, and I have ever since used
and quit it. I hated (and still do) the fact that somebody else had absolute
control over what my blog looked like, and what changes I made.

Nothing so intriguing about it, really.

Edit: Also, the sign up page itself has a confusing user interface.

------
oh_sigh
This would have been more welcome if there wasn't such jerkishness by Dustin
at the launch/shortly after the launch of svbtle.

------
debt
I always thought the quality of the article was more important than the
quality of the blogging engine.

~~~
taterbase
It is. That's why dcurtis kept it so exclusive for so long. Svbtle now has a
reputation for quality and can offer you the halo effect (for the time being).
Surprised he isn't charging anything for it though. Quality will surely go
down and dilute the reputation of just being on Svbtle.

------
vertex-four
I figure everyone's gone over Svtble's theme before, but... it's absolutely
horrible. Grey (#4d4d4d) on bright white is painful to read.

------
anupj
Sorry mate, don't care anymore! Cheers for thinking about us small people now.

------
glomph
So was the elitism just clever marketing?

~~~
gaius
Not _that_ clever... svbtle is an anti-brand now, like Upworthy.

------
DesaiAshu
After reading this post I completely understand the value in svtble. The key
here is a super easy interface to thought dump, and an easy way to turn the
thought dump into a published blog post. I have tons of these in my
notes/sms/facebook etc, but they never get shared publicly because there's no
natural transition / lack of time to thoroughly research. I'd encourage you to
push an iPhone app soon, and it needs to open up and get me typing instantly
like iOS notes

------
AznHisoka
I thought you were already open for everyone?

Oops.. I was using wp-svbtle all this time. Ah well, same thing to me :)

~~~
prezjordan
You take pride in stolen design? That's strange.

------
jsnk
Over the weekend, I worked on a Chrome extension (Youtube.md:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtubemd/akjklake...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtubemd/akjklakeodbdkmcligjlmaoihkfinegl))
that lets you embed Youtube video image easily in markdown format. The allows
you to generate markdown code for Youtube video image and links it to Youtube
video, when Youtube video URL is given. Note that this will not actually embed
the video. Instead it will display an image from the video.

I know Svbtle supports embedding Youtube videos, but I thought this would be a
good thread to mention this extension in case some people use some other
system.

------
noir_lord
I like the functionality, I'm ambiguous about the design, there where a few
times where I had to stop and really think about the UI to figure out where I
needed to go or what I wanted to get back to.

I also (and this is purely a personal thing) find that much whitespace like
staring into a lamp I suspect I'd be using something like stylish in short
order (might be nice to have something like a night mode, readability does
this really well see here..
[http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png](http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png) )

That it handles zooming really all the way up to an insane level is great (I'm
34 this year and my eyes are crap..) and it looks _really_ nice on my old
Nexus 7 1st gen.

Kudos :)

------
read
_the core of what writing is really about–sharing ideas, naturally_

This sentence might not be true. Writing is partly about sharing ideas and
partly about discovering them. In an essay at least, most of the ideas reveal
themselves after you start writing. And half of those you start with turn out
to be wrong. So you want to keep writing until you bump onto the right ones.
It's figuring out the truth you're after. Sharing something untrue isn't as
valuable.

If you had a writing tool good at getting you to share and one good at getting
you to write, the latter could be a better tool.

That's not to say Svbtle does a bad job at getting you to write. But the
distinction is important enough for any writing tool to consider.

------
mgrouchy
Knew the writing was on the wall since I got an invite a couple of weeks ago
:P

------
Taek
One thing that's bothering me about the svbtle interface is the crazy
contrast. Especially all of the white on the background, when I'm thinking I
prefer lots less noise in my environment.

In svbtle, there is a lot of really bright and really dark areas, and I find
this to be very distracting and annoying. Ideally for me, the whole website
would be a lot darker and the text and boxes would be just bright enough to be
visible, not full white but a more tame grey.

------
aen
Svbtle's great for some people and Medium's better in some ways. It's like
comparing Blogger with WordPress. The future is in content-centricity and
interface-simplicity. Let's appreciate these guys for leading the frontier.

PS: This one is more in tune with how the brain works. Pretty radical idea for
a writing interface. [https://vimeo.com/66995098](https://vimeo.com/66995098)

------
meerita
The best thing I did in my life was to move out of these kind of blogging
services. I preffer the freedom of my hosting machine, and the beauty of
Octopress.

------
qthrul
I was a bit shocked that I got invited to Svbtle back in September of last
year after not being 'worthy' of being in the early limited exclusive access.
;-)

[http://callthejury.com/so-many-blogs-so-little-
impact](http://callthejury.com/so-many-blogs-so-little-impact)

TLDR: If I was invited to Svbtle then it isn't a good sign.

------
r0s
I miss Posterous. R.I.P.

~~~
prateek_mir
I am not much aware about posterous, how different was it as compared to
posthaven ?

~~~
r0s
Well it was free, but the killer feature for me was media handeling.. it would
take just about anything you threw at it and form it into a blog post. Sound
file? It would upload to soundcloud and drop the player right in your page.
Video etc.

You could email everything too, so a zip file full of images and a quick
paragraph in email would get formatted as a nice blog post with photo gallery.

Everything (mostly) just worked and was awesome.

------
joelrunyon
Honest question: How does svbtle make money?

------
jcutrell
Really kind of frustrated with this.

Svbtle used to self-identify your work as selected to some extent. Now, what's
the differentiator between your work and everything else?

Don't say "content" please. That's obvious. But a link was more dependable to
me if it was from Svbtle. Not anymore.

------
aabalkan
Too late. Go get a medium.com account or install your own Jekyll/Pelican/Ghost
in 5 mins.

------
johnchristopher
I am a little bit out of touch regarding the who's who in the web publishing
business but this reminds me of Six Apart. Are the svbtle guys planning to
release their Typepad code in the future for anyone wishing to install it on
their own servers ?

------
shmerl
Markdown only? That's not "getting out of the way", it's limiting the ways of
expression. Getting out of the way is providing simple defaults, why not
depraving those who need more tools (HTML/CSS) of richer features.

~~~
matthiasv
HTML is part of the "specification" of Markdown. And you really want to "spice
up" your markup with CSS? I'd rather spent the time on content.

~~~
shmerl
I'd say you might want to spice up HTML with CSS if you want to achieve
anything like font styling, positioning and so on. Spending time on content
doesn't substitute spending time on presenting it the way you want. Blogger
for example allows doing all that.

A very simple and practical example where Markdown offers no help: how can you
change rtl and ltr directions of the text without CSS?

------
joshontheweb
Just trying this out now. So far I quite like they way they make it super easy
to stub out ideas for blog posts. I just stubbed out 15 post I want to write
and can now go back in and finish them when I have time.

------
eberfreitas
So, what should I use as my blogging platform? I mean, right now I'm using a
platform that uses Dropbox and I fear it might go away anytime soon.

There are a lot of options right now... Any ideas or suggestions?

------
sdegutis
I'm starting to think people like saying stuff far more than listening. Maybe
we should stop encouraging products/software that promotes that attitude?

------
colinbartlett
The signup UI is the worst:
[http://imgur.com/fD224S2](http://imgur.com/fD224S2)

------
Siecje
Can you earn add revenue from your content?

------
mkaziz
I would use Medium, except that requires various nefarious looking permissions
about my twitter account.

------
coherentpony
Is the platform open source?

------
o0-0o
Do they still hold your post for around a month before it's published?

------
atko
My only question - how did this reach #1 on hackernews? Bribed someone? :)

------
mmgutz
What would be the advantages of using this over static site generators?

~~~
jamesgeck0
The UX isn't an utterly terrible developer workflow?

I write code all day. Git is awesome, and you can pry Vim from my cold dead
hands. But Jekyll is fiddly and doesn't really match my preferred writing
workflow.

Ghost workflow: Visit URL, mash password manager (occasionally), click "new
post" and start writing. Change the title whenever I feel like it. A live
preview of the post appears on the left, and I click publish when I'm done.
Click a little button in the UI to view the finished post on my site.

Jekyll workflow: Open a terminal. Create a new file named with the current
date and the post stub. Half the time I don't know what either of those are
off the top of my head. Open Vim. Type out the post metadata block. Inevitably
get something wrong. Type post. Tab to the terminal and start Jekyll's server.
Navigate to local server URL in browser. Alt tab back and forth between
browser and editor, hitting F5 every time I want a new preview. Rename file
with new stub (optional). Git add, commit, and push. Navigate to my public
site in browser to make sure everything came out OK. Mash F5 a few times
because Github Sites hasn't compiled it yet. Delete the "We compiled your
site!" email from my inbox.

Note that Ghost requires much less prep; the majority of my time in Ghost is
just editing my post's text. Jekyll has a larger lead in time to editing, and
while editing I have to switch back and forth between my editor and the
browser for a preview. Jekyll requires more effort doing busywork that isn't
writing. I found my output dropped way off after I switched from Wordpress
because the barrier to starting a post was higher.

~~~
Skywing
If you host your jekyll blog on github, then creating a new blog post is as
simple as logging into github and going straight to your blog repo. You can
create a new file and edit straight from there. The blog is rebuilt on each
commit.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Oh, nice. iirc, I tried it when online editing first appeared on Github, and
it was a bit finicky about rebuilding the page afterwards. Good to hear it
works now.

I used prose.io for a while, but ran into a few cases where the preview didn't
match what Github generated. It looks like there's a whole new interface since
the last time I used Prose, so perhaps that's not an issue anymore. It
supports image uploads now, too.

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btbuildem
What, another signup form to fill out? Give me a break..

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redox_
You can follow this discussion using the new HN Search:
[http://hn.algolia.com/follow/7138444](http://hn.algolia.com/follow/7138444)

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pbreit
The form field design is crazy distracting!

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rmcfeeley
Hey, this is fantastic. Kudos

