> I wonder what language/platform it's written in?
I've recently wondered if we (devs) shouldn't adopt a standard like robots.txt/humans.txt, maybe dev.txt or something where we could put such information and opensource links (instead of polluting the UI sometimes with all the 'powered by' braggadacio).
I like the "ideas pane" a lot. I have exactly the same workflow, except my "ideas pane" is just a text file in Dropbox. I work on posts there until they're big enough to paste into my blog.
I'm not really interested in running my blog on someone else's platform, though (I realize I'm in the minority here).
I think I might like leaving my ideas in their raw form, though. I tend to create a bulleted, indented outline of what I'm writing before fleshing it out.
"I have exactly the same workflow, except my "ideas pane" is just a text file in Dropbox."
Interesting timing - I came up with an idea this weekend for a Dropbox-based blogging app that pushes both final and draft posts to a blog every time they're saved locally, with public access for the final posts and a private password-protected directory for the drafts.
I'm pretty sure I can make it with watch folders and Jekyll (I've seen that setup floating around HN comments), although making something more advanced with a web panel and themes might make it a lot more interesting to a larger audience.
The engine I wrote for my personal blog lets me save a draft (no, I didn't invent the idea). I'm not sure what the difference is between drafts and ideas.
Drafts in Wordpress work quite well for this purpose. I just click "New Post", write in some temporary title and a short description in the body, then click "Save Draft". Viewing drafts is easy too.
I find formatting to be the biggest annoyance in blogging, but I bet there's a markdown WP plugin for that which I should use.
Actually I do like this, but not for the "ideas" feature. I like it for the simplicity and hip minimalist aesthetic.
I think this is exactly the problem that lead to how he designed the ideas pane. This make me realized this is exactly why I don't blog, too. If I save my ideas as draft, it mentally force me to think I will have to publish it at one point. It's more of a subconscious thing.
I really like it when people thoughtfully scratch an itch that everyone else thinks has been scratched to death. There is a room for major improvements in every established technology area - be it a blogging platform, instant messaging, analytics or email clients.
PS. This also explains why Dustin needed a Markdown symbol back in February - http://drbl.in/daOE
I've been irritated by lack of features in Tumblr; whilst you don't those features, it does look like you have a cleaner approach for content-creating.
Is your definition of usable inversely proportional with the number of features and their associated buttons? Yet you're upset by the lack of features in Tumblr?
My guess would be that it's an attempt at making it very clear whose blog you're on, to disambiguate.
http://svbtle.com/ now has colours for each member blogger, and it looks like they all have their own left sidebar slideout thing. Additionally, their pulsing icons in the top left have an additional colour hint to them.
Edit: I think it's a little too intrusive and clashes with the overall feel of the rest of it, but that's just me!
Hrm, I thought it was actually kind of nice. Soft, non-obtrusive and gave a lovely "alive" feel an otherwise cold page. In fact, does anyone know of any tutorials on how to do this?
There is the temporary red overlay in the sidebar that is, as far as I can tell, new, and definitely a touch obtrusive (intentionally, no doubt); then, the relatively subtle circular pulse around the blog logo.
I'd be interested in running my own single-user version, but I'm sure there'll be a clone by the weekend (if there isn't I'll probably hack one up at my next opportunity).
Ah, I wasn't under the impression that this would become public - I wouldn't reproduce something open to others.
Thank you for making something like this a reality - I had a blank-page type editor a while back but didn't have the chops to make it actually usable at the time (hence my interest in recreating this).
From the article it looks like he wants to maintain the "branding" of his blog so people recognise it as having a consistent quality - which I think is totally ridiculous as it's way too minimal to stand out. A good designer could clone the style in minutes. So what sets it apart? The way the editor promotes capturing ideas? This part isn't open to the public. Seems a bit odd.
It's working I suppose. And the "invite only" system sure helps drive desire.
I think this system is well thought out. It has a beautiful, minimal design that actually let's you focus on the reading, once you're done playing with the kudos button.
The only criticism I have is that it relies on sites like Hacker News and Reddit or email/twitter for discussion. Blog posts may be full of errors, but readers (and maybe authors) may never find out, due to the relatively inaccessible discussion/feedback system.
Actually, I've really come to enjoy seeing a "Discuss this post on Hacker News" link at the bottom of a blog post. I've become annoyed by loading a blog post, only to discover that 3/4 of the page is just comments.
But really, the same thing could be accomplished by having the comments page be separate from the article page, yet still be hosted on the same blogging platform.
Am I correct in assuming the post text editor was all custom built? If not, can anyone link to a solution that is as clean as that? I love the idea of just typing on the page versus typing into a special box with a hundred buttons along the top
I didn't really custom build it; it's just a normal textarea element with the borders removed and the typography matched to exactly how it's displayed on the blog.
I'm curious though -- for a while now I've been seeing the svbtle style as synonymous with you & your brand, and I'm having trouble shaking that even though it's now open to other bloggers. Was this side-effect another one of your goals?
Maybe because in Venezuela we are bombarded with propaganda everyday about how terrible meritocracy is, it bothers me to see this sentiment here.
As geeks, don't we recognize that The Deck ads are better than Google AdWords? Isn't the MacBook Air currently better than probably any other laptop? Wasn't Gmail the best thing since sliced bread for a long time?
I get it that it's part of the script in a socialist revolution, but in a start-up news site?
Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be right). Just like John Gruber is a jackass, but one who is usually right and (for the context of this site) has a successful business many us would love to have.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind helping out anybody here (or being helped), but at the end of the day, I want kick all your asses and win. And if I can hire the best of you, even better.
> Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be right).
Ah, but there's the rub: Dustin doesn't have a great product and he isn't right. At best he's a good marketer: the only things he ever stands out for are his gimmicks. His best posts were gimmick posts ("watch me redesign airport passes!", "let me show you how stupid commercial graphic designers are!"); his only creations are good marketing creations ("you should follow me on Twitter here", "kudos!"). Occasionally I've seen him get halfway towards having a decent thought, but I've never seen him follow through.
Compare that to John Gruber, who's talked before about how he painstakingly selected the Daring Fireball color before he launched his blog (which has displayed his thoughts, gimmickless and unchanged, for a decade now). Greatness is a matter of finding big ideas and sticking to them; the only thing Dustin's stuck to in the few years he's been promoting himself is that people ought to remember him. But he's forgotten to create something worth remembering.
Curtis writes:
> One of my main goals for this new writing interface was to encourage myself to spend more time writing and less time presenting.
Which is admirable, and I've noticed that his writing in this new iteration is somewhat less surface-irritating. But he contradicts this in this very thread, when he says of his jackass slogan: "It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it." He cares about being remembered; it never seems to occur to him that there's more to writing good things than making them memorable.
His "about me" section already describes him as a superhero, so clearly you are just not awesome enough to understand how awesome he is. (How many people have you gotten fired from American Airlines?)
I laughed as well, but because I thought it was a fantastic move. The entire design is a brand, and by not opening it up to everybody, it will create the desire to be on the "in crowd." Arrogant? Hardly. Brilliant? Definitely.
I think the most interesting thing about whatever Dustin does is the hype he's able to build around it—I'm consistently impressed, and wonder if he might not be as effective as a promoter as he is a designer.
Who's vetting the bloggers invited to join the Svbtle network? Is it Dustin himself? Something about an exclusive, invite-only network for "creative, intelligent, and witty people" really turns me off.
Not that I wouldn't be interested in reading what only the best and the brightest have to say. Maybe it's just the way it's been presented, but in its current form it seems sort of like the Mensa of blogging platforms.
To indulge your tangent: They were indeed “arguing” in some definition of the word, but I think they kind of agreed a lot, and together painted a coherent picture I could agree with, and was glad to have read.
What I actually meant was that the argument was extremely narrow to the point of pedantry.
Is Rails good for an API?
It's a tool, and it has different merits depending on the situation. That's the answer to the question, and it's the answer to any question like it.
I said I didn't want an invite because I didn't want to be associated with the three of them arguing over so fine a point, and getting so much exposure for it.
It all seemed very weird to me. That was my real point.
I expected a github link to the software, found... a snobby, invitation-only network. No thanks, amigo, I think I'll steal your idea and release it for free.
How many other blogging platforms have boiled everything down to just that simple workflow? I'd say this is much more about execution than about the idea.
I wonder how many people gave kudos to the post by mistake? I know I did and there's no way to remove the kudos you gave afterwards. User actions should be a click not a hover.
I have a ton of respect for Mr. Curtis, but he's utterly and completely wrong on the issue. It's not a "serious" thing, just like calling someone a mean name isn't necessarily a "serious" thing, but both kind of make you a dick.
It's a dark pattern. In my opinion, at least; an ambiguous interface element with unexpected and unintended consequences. Judging by his obvious design talent, I think Mr. Curtis should know better, especially in light of the incredibly negative response. It's a dick move.
You care enough to follow through with replying to me, it seems. I'm plenty relaxed, I just thought it was worth calling a spade a spade in this case.
It's definitely bad UX. Curtis tries to brush away criticism with his claim that the "kudos" number is "an otherwise meaningless number," but this argument is fatally flawed. Plenty of things that human beings use for social signaling are, when removed from context, technically "meaningless", but within context they can hold plenty of meaning. In the case of Curtis's website, the "Kudos" counter is implied to display a count of voluntary approval. By essentially tricking users into incrementing the count, Curtis violates this expectation, which is why everyone feels "cheated" by it. Subsequent visitors to the site who don't realize the counter has been gamed may take it as an indicator of how many people enjoyed the article, when in fact the numbers are inflated by other users against their will. This is not only terrible UX, but bordering on outright deceit.
In a world dominated by social media and ubiquitous "Like" counters, for someone to brush off a Kudos count as "an otherwise meaningless number" is either an incredible display of naivety or straight-up bullshit.
While I agree, my complaint with it is even simpler: hit refresh and you can ostensibly keep adding kudos without limit. If that's not the case, then it's a UI problem because it doesn't tell you as much. If it is the case, then it certainly removes whatever meaning it has the moment someone starts inflating the count.
The problem is really a combination of the two. People expect kudos to be tracked in a reasonable fashion for the reason that, if the counter exists, it must be taken seriously. The rest of the system is stripped down, leaving people with the impression that whatever is left must be important. This is a false impression, and that's what's disappointing about the feature. Dustin Curtis has taken a serious (read: pretentious) approach to the rest of the site, but he's left the kudos system hanging by a chad.
I repeated this about a thousand times and he seems to have fixed it ;). Also, he seems to have reverted the count on his unkudos page. Not the actions I would have expected from someone who thought nothing of it.
I disagree with your outright deceit allegation, because the number of people who enjoyed the article enough for a kudos is sure to be less than the number of people who bothered with the widget in the upper-right corner of the screen. I wish I had a study handy but it's well-established that far fewer people who read an article continue interacting with the page after they're done. For me to believe that it's a serious problem I'd have to be convinced that at least 50% of the kudos were from people who didn't think it was worthy of kudos.
On the other hand, first-time visitors or those that come to look at the design (as those who get there from this discussion) are IMO likely to think "What's that? Let's hover it; maybe some tooltip will pop up"
this is a good reminder as to how different visual and user experience design are. just because you can make a pretty design does not automatically qualify you to design useable software.
It breaks discoverability by executing its action /during discovery/.
Imagine if you, using a new web browser, clicked on the "File" menu to see what was there and instead of dropping down a menu, it opened a file browser. In the end not a life-changing or permanent problem, but bad usability problem.
It's easy to call it a meaningless interaction, but it's far from meaningless. He's explicitly breaking an implicit trust between himself and the reader. He's saying "Hey reader, I'm watching you."
If you don't think this is a big deal, I invite you to think about a natural extension of this concept: A comment form that sends its entire contents to the server on every keypress.
I kind-of agree. If someones got a thing where part of their value proposition is "invite only" curation - then that same idea with different or no curators seems to be fair game…
He has "the eye" for design, though... everything looks effortless and kinda great... unlike when I try to make a page look good (yes I read about Mark Boulton and grids and a visual hierarchy and spacing and baseline and rhythm and UX but it doesn't do miracles...)
For future record: An article about a by-invitation closed-source blogging platform created by a self-proclaimed superhero is the top article on Hacker News on March 22, 2012 at 17:16 PST.
163 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadI wonder what language/platform it's written in?
Server: nginx/1.0.10 + Phusion Passenger 3.0.11 (mod_rails/mod_rack)
I've recently wondered if we (devs) shouldn't adopt a standard like robots.txt/humans.txt, maybe dev.txt or something where we could put such information and opensource links (instead of polluting the UI sometimes with all the 'powered by' braggadacio).
//edit: submitted for discussion http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3742784
How can I get an invite?
I'm not really interested in running my blog on someone else's platform, though (I realize I'm in the minority here).
Interesting timing - I came up with an idea this weekend for a Dropbox-based blogging app that pushes both final and draft posts to a blog every time they're saved locally, with public access for the final posts and a private password-protected directory for the drafts.
I'm pretty sure I can make it with watch folders and Jekyll (I've seen that setup floating around HN comments), although making something more advanced with a web panel and themes might make it a lot more interesting to a larger audience.
I find formatting to be the biggest annoyance in blogging, but I bet there's a markdown WP plugin for that which I should use.
Actually I do like this, but not for the "ideas" feature. I like it for the simplicity and hip minimalist aesthetic.
PS. This also explains why Dustin needed a Markdown symbol back in February - http://drbl.in/daOE
It looks so usable.
I've been irritated by lack of features in Tumblr; whilst you don't those features, it does look like you have a cleaner approach for content-creating.
Reminds me slightly of Trello.
Aside from that, it looks really clean!
http://svbtle.com/ now has colours for each member blogger, and it looks like they all have their own left sidebar slideout thing. Additionally, their pulsing icons in the top left have an additional colour hint to them.
Edit: I think it's a little too intrusive and clashes with the overall feel of the rest of it, but that's just me!
There is the temporary red overlay in the sidebar that is, as far as I can tell, new, and definitely a touch obtrusive (intentionally, no doubt); then, the relatively subtle circular pulse around the blog logo.
I'm still working out the problems and polishing the interactions. When they're all ironed out, I'll open it to the public.
Thank you for making something like this a reality - I had a blank-page type editor a while back but didn't have the chops to make it actually usable at the time (hence my interest in recreating this).
It's working I suppose. And the "invite only" system sure helps drive desire.
The only criticism I have is that it relies on sites like Hacker News and Reddit or email/twitter for discussion. Blog posts may be full of errors, but readers (and maybe authors) may never find out, due to the relatively inaccessible discussion/feedback system.
But really, the same thing could be accomplished by having the comments page be separate from the article page, yet still be hosted on the same blogging platform.
Dustin, I just emailed you with a name suggestion.
Edit : Okay, so much for speculation.
Am I the only person that laughed out loud at this?
It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it.
(Edit: Sigh. Now I remember why I have a rule of not commenting on Hacker News anymore.)
As geeks, don't we recognize that The Deck ads are better than Google AdWords? Isn't the MacBook Air currently better than probably any other laptop? Wasn't Gmail the best thing since sliced bread for a long time?
I get it that it's part of the script in a socialist revolution, but in a start-up news site?
Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be right). Just like John Gruber is a jackass, but one who is usually right and (for the context of this site) has a successful business many us would love to have.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind helping out anybody here (or being helped), but at the end of the day, I want kick all your asses and win. And if I can hire the best of you, even better.
His product is compelling for some people.
The Deck is compelling for some people.
MacBook Air is compelling for some people.
GMail is compelling for some people.
Ah, but there's the rub: Dustin doesn't have a great product and he isn't right. At best he's a good marketer: the only things he ever stands out for are his gimmicks. His best posts were gimmick posts ("watch me redesign airport passes!", "let me show you how stupid commercial graphic designers are!"); his only creations are good marketing creations ("you should follow me on Twitter here", "kudos!"). Occasionally I've seen him get halfway towards having a decent thought, but I've never seen him follow through.
Compare that to John Gruber, who's talked before about how he painstakingly selected the Daring Fireball color before he launched his blog (which has displayed his thoughts, gimmickless and unchanged, for a decade now). Greatness is a matter of finding big ideas and sticking to them; the only thing Dustin's stuck to in the few years he's been promoting himself is that people ought to remember him. But he's forgotten to create something worth remembering.
Curtis writes:
> One of my main goals for this new writing interface was to encourage myself to spend more time writing and less time presenting.
Which is admirable, and I've noticed that his writing in this new iteration is somewhat less surface-irritating. But he contradicts this in this very thread, when he says of his jackass slogan: "It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it." He cares about being remembered; it never seems to occur to him that there's more to writing good things than making them memorable.
Because a meaningless counter is decremented?
Not that I wouldn't be interested in reading what only the best and the brightest have to say. Maybe it's just the way it's been presented, but in its current form it seems sort of like the Mensa of blogging platforms.
Insert foot in mouth.
I really like the idea of the two columns. I'd totally use this.
Is Rails good for an API?
It's a tool, and it has different merits depending on the situation. That's the answer to the question, and it's the answer to any question like it.
I said I didn't want an invite because I didn't want to be associated with the three of them arguing over so fine a point, and getting so much exposure for it.
It all seemed very weird to me. That was my real point.
Personally I think it's bad UX, but what do I know; I'm not Dustin Curtis.
Never mind. I couldn't possibly care. It's a game. Relax.
You care enough to follow through with replying to me, it seems. I'm plenty relaxed, I just thought it was worth calling a spade a spade in this case.
In a world dominated by social media and ubiquitous "Like" counters, for someone to brush off a Kudos count as "an otherwise meaningless number" is either an incredible display of naivety or straight-up bullshit.
Imagine if you, using a new web browser, clicked on the "File" menu to see what was there and instead of dropping down a menu, it opened a file browser. In the end not a life-changing or permanent problem, but bad usability problem.
Also, usability is a subset of UX.
If you don't think this is a big deal, I invite you to think about a natural extension of this concept: A comment form that sends its entire contents to the server on every keypress.
Here's a quick python script I whipped up to dole them out. Customize to the blog post of your choosing, if you like.
https://gist.github.com/2167738
https://gist.github.com/2169730
Maybe it’s a case of something that is confusing at first, but people learn fairly quickly?
When I'm reading it is the same damn thing. You have TWO flashing beacons.
If they were longer like the breathing sleep LED on apple laptops it would be less noticeable.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744237
Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?