
Show HN: We are rethinking personal blogging – need feedback and tough questions - robot
http://followme.co
======
soneca
First, your screenshot "welcome to my site" is deceiving. Make it more clear
that is a screenshot, not your website. Actually, I don't see the need for
this screenshot to exist at all.

But about what you list of diferencials:

\- _Try without login to prove it is easier to use_ Great! You will just have
to make sure it is indeed easier to use.

\- _Edit and format posts 10x faster than your current editor_ Good value
proposition. But only the easy photo inserting and editing (with resizing)
lives up to it. It indeed looks great. But (3) Add Topics and (4) Publish your
page on social networks look like commodities on blog platforms (and not
related to the value proposition of being easier to edit).

\- _Built-in site search with relevant results._ "Your posts will never get
buried in the archives again." Is that a problem? For who?? One do not enter
at a personal blog to search for something. And why add another value
proposition?

\- _Discover users with similar interests_ Again: why add another value
proposition? And hint: you won't solve this problem. You won't get a critical
mass of "interesting people" for a looong time. And until then, having this
feature will just disappoint your users and make they feel this is a
pretentious amateur site no one cares about. Instead, why not make this
feature as a tool to discover interesting people posting interesting things on
Twitter/FB/LinkedIn/Medium? And make the posts on your platform to be "related
to:" posts on those bigger platforms.

So my personal advice would be: cut the search feature and decide if you will
focus on being __really __easier to edit or if you will focus on having a
__killer __discovery feature (allowing people to answer or at least point out
to other posts on other platforms).

~~~
robot
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

 _Site search_ : A lot of bloggers have last few posts on their front page and
rest is hard to find again. A search feature lets you discover all the content
regardless of time.

 _Discover users_ : Agree. We will focus on the tool first and network later.
Will remove that.

The idea here is to simplify personal blog setup, writing, and discovering
efficiently.

If you start a blog on wordpress, you need to host it, configure via admin
panels, go through options, install plugins. Select templates, then try to
edit parts of it and fail.

Here you get one site that works, without any setup. Content is not dispersed.
A visitor can efficiently find content.

I will revise the message to make it more clear.

~~~
soneca
Search depends on you know what you are searching. If im visiting another
person blog for the first time and enjoyed the post where i landed, i do want
to know what else of interesting that person wrote before. But i dont know
what search.

I agree with the problem, not with the ssolution (and i dont have any to
propose neither)

Edit: paul graham solved it just by showing his complete list of articles (no
other info aside title. No dates, no tags, just title):
[http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html)

------
fiatjaf
I don't like it. Is it for personal blogging or general-purpose websites?

Why rethinking if you are doing what everybody does, generating sites that
seem like everyone else's?

~~~
robot
Thanks for the feedback. It is for personal blogging.

Agree it may look like other sites. But the difference is there are fewer
steps to produce content. You edit the site in-place clicking parts of it so
you anticipate changes much better.

Same with posting: why should personal blogs have harder to use writing tools
than a social network?

Your posts should be discoverable. Your blog has a "couchdb" post but it would
take a lot of looking to find it.

Not trying to sell it - just want to understand if the message wasn't clear,
and why you don't find it valuable.

~~~
fiatjaf
I can't think of another way someone would find my CouchDB post unless through
Google -- and, as the other commenter said, I don't expect people to enter my
site and start reading everything there.

I think understand your motivations, but I think your goal (a live-editable
website) is not a new one. Products like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and others
are targetting this market. I don't like the idea, because to do this you must
either (a) limit the ability of the user to modify the website, making it
choose from predefined templates and letting him customize only a little; or
(b) make him write his own HTML and CSS.

These providers I mentioned are kinda fighting against this trade-off by
creating more and more themes and enlarging the customization space, that is
taking time and human resources, and the result is not good -- I don't like it
--, but they are too much ahead of your service. You should have a better
thing, a really different feature, innovative, as you said you are
"rethinking" blogging I thought you had this, but I don't see it.

Ok, maybe I didn't understand anything at all.

------
skykery
Remove Null values or hide them .

~~~
robot
Sure, will fix today.

