Ask HN: is there room for a new blogging service?

[Tichy]

This may be a little bit ridiculous, after all, there are wordpress.com, blogger and tumblr. But the sad fact is, I have so far been unable to provide my non-technical friends and family with blogs. Tumblr (maybe the best bet) turned out to be too slow and erratic when I evaluated their interface, blogger is ugly and has mandatory Blogger-Branding (I think), and Wordpress.com has intransparent pricing (I can't figure out how much they cost from their homepage). Furthermore, Wordpress is based on PHP - I could never figure out how to properly host multiple WP blogs on my debian server, and in general I don't trust PHP so hosting it myself makes me feel very uneasy.

For those reasons I plan to migrate my blogs to Octopress/Jekyll, which is of course not an option for non-techie people. But it made me think, maybe a similarly clean interface could be presented to non-techies anyway (kind of like Jekyll without the command line). The problem with existing blog engines seems to be that they are overloaded with Ajax and features.

[wingerlang]

If you make it such as ALL i have to do is to watch my blog-front page (and have the option to write my own CSS) i will use it.

I don't want a huge interface for stuff i will never use. I want to be able to (when logged in) double click or something on my blog post and then it will turn into a <textarea> for editing and saving. I really hate going into a huge suit for writing a little text and upload images into galleries for later insertion into posts.

 

 

It should be like this.

- Go to name.easyblog.com

- See the white, minimalistic blog (posterous is good https://jontelang.posterous.com/)

- Normal user will just read

- Admin may login

-- He will then see the blog as normal but have the option to press a "admin mode" button which will show buttons for the posts "delete" and such.

-- Adding posts: He will see a "+" at the top of the blog where he gets a WYSIWYG + textarea -- then he press Save and the new post is added. He will then press the "admin mode" again to see the blog as normal users see it to make sure nothing looks odd.

-- Editing: Same as above except you press "edit" on a post.

-- Alternative: All posts become <textarea>s + WYSIWYG editors so that you do not even have to press edit.

All in all, simple and fast.

[Tichy → wingerlang]

Thanks! What would be a good interface for inserting images?

Edit: thanks, I like that idea!

[wingerlang → Tichy]

Actually i don't know. Some kind of drag and drop into the WYSIWYG-editor would be optimal IMO. When you save the image could be automatically uploaded to a /img folder.

I just want to remove as many distracting factors as possible, clicking, and managing image uploading is one of them.

I am glad you like the idea. If you decide to give it a try and fail/need help/lack motivation hit me an e-mail at jontelang [at] gmail. I really want to see this implemented but I have little to none time right now.

[saiko-chriskun]

tumblr is slow and erratic? first I've heard that one.

secondly your 'distrust' of PHP makes no sense. Trust me, I hate php and would _never_ program in it myself, but that doesn't make wordpress any less of a good product. Hell facebook is based on php :P.

third- there's always room for a new service if it genuinely solves a problem and is executed well, so go for it ;)

[Tichy → saiko-chriskun]

Well TheOatmeal designed "Tumbeasts" for the Tumblr error pages, so I guess I am not the only one who experienced problems. I might reevaluate, but when I tried it last time (a couple of months ago) there were too many issues to make it usable for non-techies in my opinion. Maybe they rely on Flash? I have a flash blocker...

PHP - sure, it is just that I can not administrate it myself, and Wordpress.com has weird pricing. To fix hosting multiple blogs on debian, I would have to dig into the PHP code, which I would like to avoid.

Maybe these are not serious issues for the mainstream population, but I'll consider it :-/