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Show HN: Publ.ca - Instant and Beautiful Web Publishing

11 points by robee ↗ HN
Hey Everyone,

So this was a weekend project that I did basically as a favor to a friend of mine who is a writer. This friend wanted a simple way to publish his short stories on the web that gave him a short url for tweeting and had no associated branding with the published work. Essentially this is what I have done here with publ.ca . My question is that I want to know where I should take this project in terms of features.

Possible extensions to this project are:

- automatic tweeting when publishing - custom layouts and designs - markdown rendering - user accounts ( FB connect or Google Accounts ?) - analytics - publisher dashboard

I am curious if anyone has any suggestions for features that they would want from a project like this.

Any criticism is good criticism.

Here is an example of a tech crunch article displayed in publ.ca - publ.ca/ab47 - ( original source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/android-honeycomb-ipad/)

TL;DR - Publ.ca looking for feature suggestions and feedback

11 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] thread
olalonde
I would put some way to comment on stories (Facebook comments?).
robee
Thats pretty good- find some way to aggregate the tweets and facebook comments about the story. Something like Echo but something that fits the overall feel.
erohead
Sweet, looks a lot like the readability bookmarklet. They just merged/did something with instapaper, so it looks like some interesting movement in the market.

Maybe try a bookmarklet as well. Link to original source in the top title, and preserve links if possible.

joelrunyon
I'd veto the auto-tweet, but give it tweet & fb buttons.

Also, I second the comment suggestions. However, I do like the simplicity of the whole thing. That actually might be the selling point.

As much as users want more & more & more features, you could just do the opposite, keep it the simple display for writing & see what happens.

robee
I want the writer to be in full control. They should be the originator of the tweet. What do you think of only being able to re-tweet a story, IE) if the writer wants to tweet it originally they can but if they don't, others cannot tweet on their behalf.
surajr
I'd push for the accounts, and almost prefer no Author/title/etc. - as in, have everything in the text. Maybe make them optional fields?

This way I can copy paste something to share instantly. But I might be thinking of a social pastee/pastebin

aam1r
Another advantage of having accounts: users can "link" stories together to make a book. So if I post story1, story2, story3, I can log in to my account and order them as story1 -> "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", etc. You can have other cool features too: table of contents, "Save a PDF of your book"
veb
Very nice! I love the simplicity. I wonder if it'd be any good for press releases...
secret
Here's some quick thoughts: if this is going to be used for short stories (fiction/non-fiction, but not blog posts) you could monetize by letting readers build an anthology and printing nice volumes for them. You could also (if the authors agree) license the content to other sources.