I agree. That was my first reaction and I suspect most visitors will be in the same boat. I like the simple design of the landing page and in the context of a hackernews visitor, I might click through to see more of the project. I almost certainly wouldn't signup in the context of being a potential customer.
Also mention more about the themes and the level of customization I can do on my blog. That would be super helpful. Keep up the good work, you awesome creator.
Looks nice so far. I'm a fan of these new minimal blogging alternatives to Medium.
Also, check out WriteFreely for an open-sourced blogging platform that is federated with ActivityPub, that you can also deploy yourself. Write.as is the main instance.
But my advice is: don't getting in to the business of hosting other people's stuff. It's just not worth it these days, unless they're paying. But even then, it has potential to be a huge can of legal worms these days. So much so that it'll suck the life out of you and the project, along with whatever you make on 'upgrades'.
IMHO: Self-hosting (and installing your software) should be the way (back) to go.
Self-hosting doesn't sell. You and I can probably self-host but majority of the bloggers can't.
The fact that Medium exists (and Blogger, Tumblr, etc.) is a testament to the fact that most (99% of the users) don't want to or know how to self-host a blog.
Oh, I completely agree that market exists. Along with all the business models and data collection value that goes along with them, in order to make them sustainable.
But look where that's got us ;)
The tools/software just need to be very simple and easy (/foolproof, if such an app exists).
Simply not true. The plethora low-cost one-click-install WordPress hosting providers out there are testament to this.
Over the weekend I was asked to set up a remote-hosted WordPress site for a friend, and all the major web-hosters out there claim to hosting 100s of thousands of WordPress blogs.
(I ended up choosing 1&1.co.uk as they are UK based and seemed to offer good options for a good price... however the setup was not as easy as it could have been.)
Naturally, many of us here in HN might be able to rent and administer our 'own' dedicated servers and run whatever we want on them. And some just can't (or choose not to).
But to the main point: "self-hosted" means that you are responsible for the content - and any legal or social implications therein. Not the "social media blogging platform du jour". It's your blog. You are the 'editor'/'publisher'.
The host itself has certain protections against whatever you might want to host. But it's your responsibility to act upon complaints.
And in today's increasingly litigious society, that's going to be massive drain. Emotionally, as well as financially. And that will always destroy any productivity the product itself should be getting.
I just think that "building (and selling!) tools" for users, to do what they want with, in 'space' they 'can call their own' is a better proposition than "building networks and apps to make it easy to pour everyone's content into silos. And transfer some degree of copyright in order to do so. And have to answer to all the complaints of abuse etc. etc. "
btw: I'm referring more to the issues of "oh my [insert deity]! Someone who has a blog on a system you run has offended|stolen from|attacked|etc. me.." kind of complaints.
'Free' users are the worst users in that respect. Because they have none.
I just moved to write.as from Medium and it's great. Primarily because it's $1 a month hosted, I can use my own domain and there is literally zero clutter in either the drafting page or the display page.
No customization aside from fonts and some light markup makes it really clean.
pro tip: be careful in using force push. In the past there's a version of git where it defaults to force all your local branches into the remote copy. When I did use force push, it pushed everything including my outdated local copy of PROD. Fortunately we were able to fix this before somebody else ran a git pull.
the new versions I believe are configured safer now afaik.
On Gitlab you can host pages backed by their free private repos, and also if required you can use their free integrated CI to run any static site generator build step you might have.
It's a really good plaform for hosting a blog for free with the 'publish on git push' workflow mentioned above.
Tried on my 25inch screen , I thought the call to action was broken it just that the slider was already open it seems like.
Love the idea and the concept, a bit more detail in UI would be nice. Just having an app that render fast unlike Medium is already a huge plus in my opinion.
Seems nice, but I still really miss the simplicity of 'post to your blog via an email' that Posterous used to do before they shut it down.
That methodology suited me best, because it allowed me to post to my (then) blog regularly just be sending an email to a certain address (and from a certain address). I could be in the field on my iPhone or something and take a couple of pictures and write up a quick post and send it to go live in seconds.
I wish more things used email. It's really handy to be able to compose something in email and send it without having to think about whether or not I am online.
Does it let you create microbolog-like posts without titles?
Does it support tags?
Does it support MarkDown?
Does it support ATOM/RSS?
Does it let people comment and discuss the posts easily?
Does it let you embed media (pictures, YouTube videos, SoudCloud tracks, formulae and diagrams etc)?
Can I take a look at an example blog on this platform?
Pretty impressed with the first part (I didn't yet know a reasonably functional blogging CMS that doesn't require posts to have titles) but lack of media embedding feature effectively disqualifies the rest for me. Lack of way to embed pictures seems next to ridiculous nowadays, lack of way to embed YouTube videos feels a huge inconvenience (this is exactly what makes me unhappy with GitHub Pages), native support for SoudCloud tracks, formulae and diagrams is what I would love to have but can substitute with a workaround (by hosting audio tracks on YouTube and rendering formulae/diagrams to pictures).
FWIW, Wordpress is happy to let you post something with a blank title field. I'm looking at my self-hosted WP installation and I've got a couple dozen that float to the top when I sort by title.
Yeah, it’s got a lot of features, even without opening up the Pandora’s vault of plugins. Anything that’s getting close to old enough to vote is scary inside.
Hi, a private post means that it will not appear on your public blog and can only be viewed from your management panel. You can still share a private post and generate a unique link for it to be shown to others.
If by "similar to Medium" you mean "shows your users annoying popups if they're not logged in and doesn't actually do RSS so you can't get all your feeds in one place", then I certainly hope not :)
It's not advertised the correct way, so feed readers can't find it, which makes it effectively a non-starter for most people I'd think. They're doing the Google thing where they implement the spec just enough to claim they implement it, but not enough for anyone to use it so that they can claim it wasn't their fault and no one used it.
That's still good to know for the future though, thanks.
