Looks interesting, as I'm looking at alternatives to blogger for my new site. Going down my checklist, you'll support a custom domain and comments (via disqus).
Here's what's left unticked on my checklist...
Image hosting. (Will you host my pictures or do I have to find external server space for them?)
RSS/ATOM feeds.
Multiple writers on a single blog.
Mobile theme.
It supports image hosting. I didn't want to have to upload images to another server somewhere. It even supports multiple versions of your images (e.g. retina and regular).
It's fully responsive so it's good for mobile.
I have RSS on the roadmap, but it won't be there on day 1. Have too many things to do right now. It also won't have support for multiple writers on day 1.
I think I forgot to disable NoScript. Sorry about that. I should have tried it in Chrome as well. I just assumed you were still working on the details... like money.
So a price has been placed on an almost exact copy of Medium without the benefits of Medium (an existing readership, existing capital), it's a copy right down to the typeface and even the green coloured buttons. How does one have complete control over their brand with Silvrback? There's no ability to customise the design beyond what already exists. There's nothing marketable about this product yet.
I think the 'brand' problem people have with Medium is less "my post looks like the same as all of these other posts!" and more "when people want to read more of my posts, they're more inclined to go to medium.com instead of my personal site!".
I agree that there should be a customizable design, though. That's not a particularly difficult thing to implement.
Just signed up. This is literally exactly what I want.
The only thing I'd add is that I hope at some point down the line there's some level of customization (even the ability to add an external stylesheet.) For this kind of thing, I'm much more attracted to the backend than the frontend, and the ability to tinker with fonts and what not is important to me.
I'm glad I learned about typography and CSS so I could do my own blog, but if I hadn't this is exactly what I wanted. Is there an example of code formatting anywhere?
Could you provide more details? How many servers, where is the data stored, what type of support will you offer, is it an LLC, how many people behind it, company roadmap, application roadmap, what happens with it if you die tomorrow, etc?
I don't mean to be negative, but why should I pay $29/year for blogging platform when I can install something like Jekyll on a free Heroku (or insert your favorite PaaS) and host my posts on another free blogging site, like Tumblr.
Basically I'm asking what's so great about Silvrback over other free alternatives?
If you can install Jekyll or set up your own VPS and find the prospect of having to do so to have a personal blog enjoyable rather than a hassle, you're really not the target customer for these sorts of things.
So, it's convenience? Which is okay, I guess I'm just so used of setting up stuff like that, that I didn't even consider it a "restraint", but now that I think of it I can see how for some people it's not worth the time to struggle through the setup process and just pay the fee.
Heroku or other PaaS will crash out if you're relying on the free service and get any kind of spike.
Seriously, $29/year is nothing if you're an active blogger. It's a small fraction of most professionals' hourly rate. If you're spending any significant time writing, I'd be much more concerned about many other factors than forking out $29/year. If anything, I'd worry if it's too low, ie will it be reliable enough?
Additionally, even if you know how to install blogging software (which most writers don't of course), you'll probably underestimate the effort and you'll need to keep it updated with security patches at the least.
Well in the case of Heroku, the free tier is really not designed for any sort of production use and the next level up is considerably more than $29/year.
I wanted to start blogging and set up Octopress/Jekyll, and spent a few days choosing a theme and then playing with the colors. Granted, I was not entirely happy with how it ended up looking, and generally did not have much motivation to start writing. Looking back, there seems to be some nice themes I'd be happy with[1].
But since I do not yet have the habit of writing, any little thing that will take time from writing/publishing a blog post will interfere with a spur of inspiration.
This takes care of all my needs: no need to think about the design, no need to worry about deploying and maintaining, etc.
Looks like nice execution and everything, but guys, I have to ask, is Wordpress really that hard to set up? Copying Medium's theme shouldn't be THAT much work...
Wordpress is easy to install if you're already familiar with setting up a LAMP stack. A lot of people who just want to blog are not. It's easy to get running and install themes, but honestly it's almost a full-time job to keep it running right. You have to keep up with security updates and deal with confusing config options for custom domains. wp_config, Apache, and MySQL are not something you can use casually.
Also, performance is terrible unless you cache aggressively, which most people don't because it's a lot of work, even with W3. The nice thing about real hosted solutions is they can handle extra load if it happens.
I get why it's popular. The blogging interface is very good, but trying to setup/maintain a server makes me want to pull my hair out.
There's no reason you need to maintain all of that -- do a one-click install someplace like Bluehost, Dreamhost, or ZippyKid and they'll manage everything, and do core WP upgrades as well automatically. There's also WP.com.
Not to mention that Wordpress is a security nightmare out of the box, and even more so if you don't keep it up to date weekly. Its just too much work if all you want is a nice blogging platform.
I like the idea a lot, and I like the UI and aesthetic. From a writer's point of view though, you're marketing page and these requests for info in the comments seem too focused on the tech details. I would guess that bubbling up the problems you're solving here for writers on your marketing message would help you gain more traction.
Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.
For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon:
"I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."
This looks great, and I've been wanting to start blogging for a while now. I hesitated on the $29, even though it is not much because, why pay for something I possibly will not use (e.g. I never get around to writing anything more than a few, if any, posts).
But then I realized (a) I would not be charged until receiving an invite, and (b) if I've put money down for this, that alone puts some pressure on forcing myself to write.
I just set up a new blog using Pelican. My considerations were much like what you've listed. The price point seems right as well. I'm tempted to sign on, but my workflow is holding me back. I've got my Pelican based blog set up so I never have to leave Vim to write/organize/publish. Every other workflow I've tried for blogging has quickly decreased my output to... nil.
It seems to me if I switched to Silvrback I'd have to either use the admin interface to write (I assume it doesn't have Vim keybindings) or copy and paste from Vim.
I did the same thing, and I really love Pelican. Silvrback does about 80% of what I need for http://steveasleep.com/ but that's more like 100% for most people.
To me it's actually easier to write a post in Vim and then 'make gh-pages' to push it to the internet. But I don't count that against this service at all.
The main reason I won't be using this service is that I pop out more open source projects than blog posts, and my site is more about project commentary than blogging, so the "post" format doesn't really work for me.
hosted is good but i require the option to easily host it myself (like github pages).
My content is my life and I want it to be around in 40 years. Even if facebook bans my account for a TOS violation where they changed the terms out from under me. Even if google hands my account to law enforcement because another country's government doesn't agree with my free speech.
You can export your posts at any time with Silvrback. You have full ownership. That's why I'm making it a paid solution, otherwise there would be the risk of your data being sold to advertisers.
it needs to be trivial to rehost. I've been through a blog content migration before, it was difficult enough that I didn't bother to migrate a portion of my data.
I am very sad that, Medium as a platform is so completely misunderstood here. It's not trying to be a place where writers are the center of attention. It's one of the few attempts, I think is somewhat successful, in democratizing the content, not the writer. I thought Quora was on it back in the day, but it drifted off now, completely.
I am also not sure why anyone who is serious about his personal-branding as to pay $29 would want to stick to a common-theme, especially when there are so many free super-customizable alternatives. People who are serious enough to pay might as well consider paying someone else to design the personal-theme and have it setup with Markdown somewhere for free.
What's even more disheartening is to see someone who is such a skilled person to ram up the themes from Medium and setup a product with such ease, is the person who misunderstood the Medium and add more product-clutter into the market, indifferent to the work of the designers of Medium with a great and noble vision.
Edit: I said 'misunderstood' because of following
> Medium is great for readers but it is bad for writers.
I am sorry, but it's great for writers, you don't need to be among the elite to share an idea with world. And that's something very powerful.
With regards to "branding", I agree with this comment elsewhere[1]:
> I think the 'brand' problem people have with Medium is less "my post looks like the same as all of these other posts!" and more "when people want to read more of my posts, they're more inclined to go to medium.com instead of my personal site!".
Medium is a very compelling product, but it isn't for everyone. I'm not sure what your argument is, other than "Medium is misunderstood, so people should not create similar offerings."
I think the OP understands Medium, and opted to create something that would suit his needs as well as possibly others'.
I agree that Medium is misunderstood. I have no idea, as a reader, what the compelling differences are between WP, Medium, Blogspot, or any of the other numerous blogging platforms out there.
On a related note, I found an app called Haroopad which is a cross-platform offline Markdown editor[1]. It even supports some GitHub flavored Markdown.
This looks great! Do you plan to support comments? I know it's a difficult thing to do so I'm not expecting that, just curious. I also know about Disqus, but that is no good for a technical blog since they took away the ability to post code samples a year or two ago.
This lacks a lot of the nice things that makes Medium great. Just off the top:
1) The sidebar's navigation feels bloated and useless at the same time. Needs to be tighter and more useful. Why not put the last five posts' title in there? Move the social icons in there as well, they are super distracting floating on the right side. Simplify the page presentation.
2) The footer of the site should link to the post I made before this one. Similar to how medium links to a random post.
3) The hover effect on the list of posts is brutal. Way too harsh. The list itself is also weird. Why do I care when it was last edited? Show the subtitle if there is one instead.
4) Medium putting the author bio at the top is really nice. Same with who helped you write it and last updated. I miss it in your design. Medium also has a much better homepage with a really nice bio bar.
Great idea and execution. You're filling a need that many people have and nailed the design. Naturally, this thread is full of legitimate suggestions for improvement, but you've got an excellent first iteration.
I'm not quite the type of person who needs your site, but I'm close enough to recognize its value. Keep it up and pay no mind to the "Why not X instead?" people. This is unique and worthwhile.
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird to be writing blog posts inside a web browser? What's wrong with a text editor? Is it just the "publish" button? Or do people find it actually helps the writing process itself? (It doesn't for me, I edit my blog posts locally and push them with rsync when they're ready to publish.)
I can see wanting to edit across multiple devices, sure, but that doesn't require an online editor, just an online location for files--something like Dropbox, or if you're concerned about keeping your data really private, a server that you control access to and can use to sync files. Then you can still use the most effective editor for each individual device, instead of being stuck inside the online editor's lowest common denominator.
Right, but what if you're borrowing a computer. I completely agree, it's more private, but it might lose some of the ease of use.
I think a bug rain that things like Statemic and other databaseless systems are popular is because they kinda offer the best of both worlds: they have the online editor, and command line-less interface, the popular content management systems; and they have some of the simplicity of today's static site generators, namely the use of a simple markup language, and a last file system.
I see the appeal, and have visited considered building my own, but haven't because my existing Jekyll/custom python systems work fine for me right now.
I currently use Jekyll + GitHub Pages. The work involved in correcting a one-character typo is annoying if I'm on my laptop, but nigh-impossible if I'm on my phone.
Can't you just edit the file directly on Github? It's what I did recently with a one word typo I noticed while I was out of town and only had my phone.
By "text editor" I meant a text editor running on my local machine, something like emacs or vim or gedit (or KWrite/Kate, which is what I actually use since I run KDE).
92 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttp://www.silverstripe.com/
Here's what's left unticked on my checklist...
It supports image hosting. I didn't want to have to upload images to another server somewhere. It even supports multiple versions of your images (e.g. retina and regular).
It's fully responsive so it's good for mobile.
I have RSS on the roadmap, but it won't be there on day 1. Have too many things to do right now. It also won't have support for multiple writers on day 1.
I agree that there should be a customizable design, though. That's not a particularly difficult thing to implement.
The only thing I'd add is that I hope at some point down the line there's some level of customization (even the ability to add an external stylesheet.) For this kind of thing, I'm much more attracted to the backend than the frontend, and the ability to tinker with fonts and what not is important to me.
will defintely check it out, but if i dont like it... you might have some competition
However I do prefer this style to Medium/ what ever that s one is.
Thanks!
Basically I'm asking what's so great about Silvrback over other free alternatives?
Seriously, $29/year is nothing if you're an active blogger. It's a small fraction of most professionals' hourly rate. If you're spending any significant time writing, I'd be much more concerned about many other factors than forking out $29/year. If anything, I'd worry if it's too low, ie will it be reliable enough?
Additionally, even if you know how to install blogging software (which most writers don't of course), you'll probably underestimate the effort and you'll need to keep it updated with security patches at the least.
But since I do not yet have the habit of writing, any little thing that will take time from writing/publishing a blog post will interfere with a spur of inspiration.
This takes care of all my needs: no need to think about the design, no need to worry about deploying and maintaining, etc.
[1] https://github.com/imathis/octopress/wiki/3rd-Party-Octopres...
Also, performance is terrible unless you cache aggressively, which most people don't because it's a lot of work, even with W3. The nice thing about real hosted solutions is they can handle extra load if it happens.
I get why it's popular. The blogging interface is very good, but trying to setup/maintain a server makes me want to pull my hair out.
All are more expensive than 29/yr though.
Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.
For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon: "I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."
But then I realized (a) I would not be charged until receiving an invite, and (b) if I've put money down for this, that alone puts some pressure on forcing myself to write.
So I've signed up.
It seems to me if I switched to Silvrback I'd have to either use the admin interface to write (I assume it doesn't have Vim keybindings) or copy and paste from Vim.
To me it's actually easier to write a post in Vim and then 'make gh-pages' to push it to the internet. But I don't count that against this service at all.
The main reason I won't be using this service is that I pop out more open source projects than blog posts, and my site is more about project commentary than blogging, so the "post" format doesn't really work for me.
My content is my life and I want it to be around in 40 years. Even if facebook bans my account for a TOS violation where they changed the terms out from under me. Even if google hands my account to law enforcement because another country's government doesn't agree with my free speech.
I need to own my content.
I am also not sure why anyone who is serious about his personal-branding as to pay $29 would want to stick to a common-theme, especially when there are so many free super-customizable alternatives. People who are serious enough to pay might as well consider paying someone else to design the personal-theme and have it setup with Markdown somewhere for free.
What's even more disheartening is to see someone who is such a skilled person to ram up the themes from Medium and setup a product with such ease, is the person who misunderstood the Medium and add more product-clutter into the market, indifferent to the work of the designers of Medium with a great and noble vision.
Edit: I said 'misunderstood' because of following
> Medium is great for readers but it is bad for writers.
I am sorry, but it's great for writers, you don't need to be among the elite to share an idea with world. And that's something very powerful.
> I think the 'brand' problem people have with Medium is less "my post looks like the same as all of these other posts!" and more "when people want to read more of my posts, they're more inclined to go to medium.com instead of my personal site!".
Medium is a very compelling product, but it isn't for everyone. I'm not sure what your argument is, other than "Medium is misunderstood, so people should not create similar offerings."
I think the OP understands Medium, and opted to create something that would suit his needs as well as possibly others'.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251620
[1] - http://pad.haroopress.com/
1) The sidebar's navigation feels bloated and useless at the same time. Needs to be tighter and more useful. Why not put the last five posts' title in there? Move the social icons in there as well, they are super distracting floating on the right side. Simplify the page presentation.
2) The footer of the site should link to the post I made before this one. Similar to how medium links to a random post.
3) The hover effect on the list of posts is brutal. Way too harsh. The list itself is also weird. Why do I care when it was last edited? Show the subtitle if there is one instead.
4) Medium putting the author bio at the top is really nice. Same with who helped you write it and last updated. I miss it in your design. Medium also has a much better homepage with a really nice bio bar.
I'm not quite the type of person who needs your site, but I'm close enough to recognize its value. Keep it up and pay no mind to the "Why not X instead?" people. This is unique and worthwhile.
I think a bug rain that things like Statemic and other databaseless systems are popular is because they kinda offer the best of both worlds: they have the online editor, and command line-less interface, the popular content management systems; and they have some of the simplicity of today's static site generators, namely the use of a simple markup language, and a last file system.
I see the appeal, and have visited considered building my own, but haven't because my existing Jekyll/custom python systems work fine for me right now.