Svbtle’s dashboard is designed to work the same way your brain works. It encourages you to dump ideas, links, and thoughts into a flow of draft posts, and then makes it easy to slowly sculpt those ideas into publishable articles. It just feels natural.
This isn't the type of marketing copy that makes me want to use the product, and in-fact drives me away from it. Contrast with Medium's more neutral, objective copy: https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04
If the copy is off-putting, it's because my natural cynicism that such text is used to polish up an otherwise mundane and common pattern...however, this copy gets a thumbs up from me for its relative lack of adjectives...e.g., none of this: "Svbtle's beautiful dashboard"..."It gracefully encourages"..."an amazing flow of beautiful draft posts"
I don't feel it as strongly as minimaxir apparently does, but the copy bugged me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's impressed with itself and encourages you to be impressed with yourself as well.
Personally, I prefer a more matter-of-fact approach. The less bullshit I get in a marketing pitch, the less I worry that they need to bullshit me to cover up for issues I haven't yet discovered. But then, I'm not in Svbtle's target market; I'm very unlikely to use a hosted platform to publish.
...the copy bugged me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's impressed with itself...
Definitely! Having just got back from watching the X Games, the comparison that springs to mind is that this sort of thing bugs me the way any opinion column published in any Aspen CO newspaper bugs me. "When I think about how perceptive and fortunate I am to have chosen to live in such a wonderful community..."
Maybe it's a Colorado thing? It reminds me of the same coffee shop conversation I used to overhear:
'I just love living in Boulder, it's so diverse.' Said by white person to other white person on a day I went only saw white people on the way to the office with all white people before I went home to a largely white community.
I'm sure they were great people and I loved my neighborhood in the suburbs but it and Boulder were anything but diverse from an ethic or cultural point of view.
the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's impressed with itself and encourages you to be impressed with yourself as well.
Huh. I've never thought of it in those words, its a great explanation for the tone of writing has been driving me batty. The first self-congratulatory superfluous adjective I see puts me directly into "I'm being lied to" mode.
Because my brain doesn't necessarily work how your brain works. Saying they've figured out how the brain works is like saying they've figured out how fashion works or design works. Everyone does things differently, so their preferred method may not be the best for me.
Well, he did study neuroscience for a while, I think he's informed enough to give educated guesses to how the mind operates enough to design a platform that operates much in the same way.
I also read that and thought "Oh, they know how my brain works? Seems a bit presumptuous..."
I thought the next section of copy was even more off-putting. "It cares about your identity." Because your name appears on the article and you can use your own domain and avatar. How is that differentiated from any platform that allegedly doesn't care about your identity?
Writers shouldn’t be defined by the brands of their publishers...
And yet, every svtble blog I've seen is very clearly a svtble page first, text content second, and any consideration for personal identity a distant third. I don't really have an issue with that but why feature such a ridiculous claim?
That seems like a rather bizarre idea to attribute to Svbtle. It seems clear to me that the "you" in their copy is someone who is likely to be interested in their product. That's an extremely common wording in marketing copy.
I don't think they ever had an undo feature. I remember when the platform was first introduced... people complained about it then too. Plus I'm pretty sure it's only been around for ~<2 years.
It's interesting how much such an utterly irrelevant thing annoys me. There's really no reason why accidentally making a number increase by one should matter, but I suppose it's the fact that the site is falsely representing it as a deliberate action by me.
It's not irrelevant. It's a design decision that punishes curiosity with unwanted and nonundoable actions. What else is the site going to do on my behalf because of something as simple as parking my mouse on the wrong part of the screen or in this case hovered over a nonintuitive button expecting some hover text to tell me what it is?
There isn’t “really no reason” why it’s annoying; it’s exactly as you said: the site is falsely representing your upvote as a deliberate action. And your action changes a number, labeled “kudos”, seen by all future visitors to the page, so your action ends up implying endorsement of the page to future visitors. That’s why the kudos feature annoys me – it falsely represents the page to be popular, but rather than just completely making up a number of kudos like a normal liar, it ties the number of kudos to the actions of unwitting page visitors. That gives the author plausible deniability that it’s possible that that many people really did like the page, though in fact that is very unlikely.
I agree, but isn't this an HN problem too, with upvotes? (If it's possible to un-up or down vote a story or comment on HN, please someone tell me how!)
HN doesn’t let you un-upvote something either, but you need to un-upvote something on HN far less often than on Svbtle. On Svbtle, it is very easy to accidentally “kudos” a post, because all you have to do is move your mouse over the kudos circle, and the site doesn’t warn you that doing so will trigger a kudos. On HN, at least you have to click a button-looking thing to trigger the non-undoable action of upvoting.
HN's UI gives you a much stronger hint of what the controls do.
You cannot undo an upvote (you can unflag posts and articles though). This is particularly a problem when using HN on mobile devices where distinguishing up and down votes is all but impossible. I'll often make multiple wrong clicks trying to navigate to a link or vote on an item. It's frustrating.
Subtle's interface is doubly deceptive: it lies to the user and it misrepresents the consequences of those lies. Makes me lose a lot of trust and faith in the product, actually. As well as those who use it.
I did that once awhile back. I didn't know what the little bulls-eye was for. When I hovered over it, it said don't move. I was expecting some silly thing to happen (like when the bottom of a Kickstarter page gets cut off). There is no indication that what I was doing was "up-voting" a stupid blog post. Possibly one of the dumbest features ever.
He is obviously intelligent enough to know that people don't think the number is meaningless. My guess is that he was just too lazy to add the undo, and also takes a small amount of pleasure in seeing people get annoyed at something he thinks they shouldn't get annoyed. Not the end of the world, and he actually does have a small point (accidentally incrementing a "kudos" count is not really something to get bothered over). But with the pretentious blog post, his underlying douchiness reveals itself.
group hug
I got the invite some two weeks ago. The acceptance of my sloppy application already lead me to believe they were opening up the site pretty soon. Just working through the backlog.
It is. That's why dcurtis kept it so exclusive for so long. Svbtle now has a reputation for quality and can offer you the halo effect (for the time being). Surprised he isn't charging anything for it though. Quality will surely go down and dilute the reputation of just being on Svbtle.
I just signed up, and immediately considered the quality of svbtle. My first post on other platforms is usually a very weak test post.
Considering it is svbtle, I decided to give a lot more thought to my post. If that's the effect it gives me, providing more effort and quality to my own thoughts, then it's worth it.
The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?
Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I couldn't tell from the blog post.
I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product is for.
I would bet a small amount of money that Twitter outlasts Medium. And if Medium outlasts Twitter, do you think Medium will just sit by and say "well that sucks that none of our users can access their blogs"?
In that case, think of a 24 hour datacenter outage then.
Unless Twitter gives Medium more information about usera on authentication than I think they do, I don't know how Medium could possible verify the owners of each blog.
Good design is a fleeting, abstract concept that has more to do with correlation than anything else: Correlate something with good content and the design seems good by association. When it becomes common, though, it is ready for displacement.
This is true of virtually every "good design" over the years. At the beginning people almost always thought it was superior in some way.
Apple grew because they made products people wanted at opportune times, executing brilliantly. Indeed, though, Apple proves the point I was making: They executed well and made products people wanted, so every decision they made goes backwards into justifying itself as good design. Speaking of Dustin Curtis, that the iPhone was 3.5" was held as some holy number of smartphone size (rather than being the size that Apple cemented themselves into back when building a 3.5" LCD was actually fairly expensive). And then 4.0" became the ultimate in design. And, soon enough, larger sizes will become the pinnacle of design.
Were any other company responsible for making the new Mac Pro, it would have been met with devastating reviews. Correlation, however, and people somehow reach to find a way to make a case for why it is actually a good design.
Good design is so much more than whether the header looks like stitched leather with embossed text. It it about how things behave, and how that aligns with what people want and need.
"Good design" is in the eye of the beholder. For example, personally, I find Apple's designs to be a bit contrived, pretentious, and having the feel of trying too hard to be simple. However, a lot of people don't agree. In particular, people who: a) have a lot of disposable income or b) who want to attach themselves to a "sexy" technology brand probably either don't even think about Apple's designs, or else find them attractive or c) both of those.
In other words, they became the most valuable company in the world, even though they have a tiny share of the market in almost every segment they're in other than the mobile handset space, because enough people are willing to pay the "Apple Tax".
Good design isn't the only thing that's made them so valuable. They've also made a lot of very smart strategic decisions to do with their supply chain and finances, which enables them to execute designs that their competitors can't afford to.
I always felt Medium borrowed heavily from Svbtle, which came first. Now, Svbtle brings something different to the table: like Medium, it's simple to use and focused on writing. Unlike Medium, you get to own your identity, use your CNAME, etc...
The thing about Medium though is that it requires you to have a beautiful large image for every post, otherwise it looks terrible. There are a lot of terrible looking Medium blogs with ugly pictures.
Apart from what you said, I miss information about pricing, at least I didn't find any.
I assume that this will be a Freemium product and I also think that the "pro" version will have some features that I would sooner or later need, at least that's my experience with other platforms I tested.
One example being Google's App engine, which turned out to be rather expensive compared to competitors and didn't justify that for me. Investing a lot of hours in a platform that you don't end up using is not that satisfying.
It feels to me that they did build this for a certain type of person. One who likes writing without distractions. One who likes to brainstorm. One who appreciates simplicity.
I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis.
It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products that start out with a small number of people who love it... this could also be appreciated and used by others.
I am not a serious writer, but I hate writing in square spaces ui because its distracting. I might not have been able to articulate this because I'm not a serious writer - But in hind sight I realize that I usually write in word and then paste into squarespace. Svbtle eliminates this process - it makes writing simpler.
So yes. Built for a specific sub set. But with features that everyone can appreciate.
To me that still feels too general: "seasoned and experienced authors" could be a 45 year-old erotica writer who sells books on Amazon, or it could be a 23 year-old tech news blogger who's been posting since age 15.
For example, imagine if the blog post / homepage looked something like this:
"Blogging built for developers"
-"Having trouble building a technical audience?"
-"Want to properly format your posts with syntax highlighting?"
I'll add that the original "selling" point of Svbtle was its "drafts first" approach (that I really appreciate).
There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach.
Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.
Yes, the identity aspect is interesting. Medium seems to be focused on pleasing readers. The whole site is designed to read one article to the next. Often from different authors. This might make reading easier, but might not be best for writers.
Svbtle does have that aspect (it calls itself "a new kind of magazine"), but seems to put a lot of energy into pleasing the writers.
I've taken to using Draft for all my writing and then just export the post or whatever to submit it to my blog that's self-hosted on Wordpress.
Using Wordpress to simply serve up my content and manage comments has been working so far. I'm in between being locked in and lazy so I haven't bothered moving to something like Ghost.
> Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?
I've been using Svbtle for a while now, and for me, the killer is this, in order: On my own domain, looks great, and hosted by someone else.
I care that I'm not putting content I care about into a closed platform. I'd never post to Medium.
I'm a backend kind of developer, so knowing how to design something myself is awkward. I could pay someone to do it, but I'd still have to implement it.
While I am a backend developer, the last thing I want to do is deal with ANOTHER project to yak shave and suck up more of my time. Hosting it myself is a no-go.
I've been wanting a very simple, minimalistic platform to blog. I _thought_ the reason I've abandoned my wordpress blog is because I dislike how complex and advanced it is. I want the simplest thing ever.
Svbtle looked like that thing since it first came out. I'll find out soon enough.
I just tried to test out its technical aspects, here's what I found:
> I like it, but noticing a few problems so far. Can’t tab while writing markdown. No live preview for markdown (may or may not be a problem). No confirmation of saving changes if you close the tab/navigate away. Drag and drop to upload images works okay, but Cmd+V doesn’t.
> Fenced blocks don’t do syntax highlighting (for Go at least).
> Can’t see invisible whitespace.
> The rest is good.
> Also, I don't see a way to export your content, nor a way to delete your account.
Silvrback performs well under stress. It's setup to autoscale when a traffic surge is detected so the platform can easily handle articles making the front page of HN. Unicorn and memcached also really help.
I like the functionality, I'm ambiguous about the design, there where a few times where I had to stop and really think about the UI to figure out where I needed to go or what I wanted to get back to.
I also (and this is purely a personal thing) find that much whitespace like staring into a lamp I suspect I'd be using something like stylish in short order (might be nice to have something like a night mode, readability does this really well see here.. http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png )
That it handles zooming really all the way up to an insane level is great (I'm 34 this year and my eyes are crap..) and it looks really nice on my old Nexus 7 1st gen.
"Open" for use but not for inspection / modification / sharing… It's like all sorts of SaaS: it's a lock-in, a jail, that is open for you to enter. Ok, that's a bit harsh. But still, we've got lots of good tools like this, we don't need another proprietary thing. It looks nice though, would be useful if it were fully FLOSS.
The atom feed will represent the compiled and rendered end content. If I have, say, source code snippets, that leaves me in a position of needing to parse out the original code so I can redo it in whatever new highlighting syntax my new blog uses. I might end up with resized images instead of originals, etc etc etc. It's not a real substitute for a proper backend export.
This is why I'm such a huge fan of Octopress and nothing has been able to pull me away from it. Everything's in a git repo. Backups are one command. All my original text is safe in Markdown format.
It might not look as cool as Medium or Svbtle, or have all the features, but it's relatively easy to use, and more importantly immune to platform lock-in.
That is one thing I've been impressed with about Google Takeout, is that I can download all my blogger data into a big ol' XML file. It makes me feel a little better about using a hosted platform.
I'm hoping that this trend will be catch on and will get more hosted services supporting export functionality in the future.
Should take a look at Ghost then, found it mentioned in another comment deep in the tree here: Open Source (MIT licensed), self hosted (or hosted for a small fee), non-profit setup and a core focus on blogging.
Link: https://ghost.org/
Oh thank god! Before this, I had nowhere to post all my brilliant thoughts except medium, blogger, wordpress, posthaven, quora, facebook, google+, livejournal and myspace.
Can't resist to add this:
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
I did this for a long time. But the problems start right away when you want to add some navigation between pages. And then you want to have a chronological display of posts, or a master index, or tags. Then you want some consistent style, headers, menus. Then you figure you'd like comments. And search. And analytics. Then you realize you're half way to writing your own half assed blog engine and go check out Wordpress.
Wordpress reminds me of Ron Swanson saying "Never half-ass two things, son. Whole-ass one thing."
But in general, Wordpress is rife with inconsistent UIs, plugins that cause each other problems, and attempting to be all things to all people. It's moved way, way past being just a blog engine.
How fancy does you blog need to be? WP tosses most of the spam, lets you moderate the rest of these comments, makes it minimally painful to post text and images, and works without JavaScript. What more do you need?
Chronological display of posts? Tags? You have so much content you need so much stuff to organize it?
Don't need menus, headers, consistent style. Use plain html.
Comments? God no. You'll have spam, you'll have to manage it. What you want is a contact page with your email address and your phone number. Everyone knows how to use those.
Search? This means you have too much stuff. Trim, keep the good stuff only.
Medium drive me nuts. Though its a good writing software, I can't follow people that I find interesting. Instead we are following vague "collections" from a group of random people I don't care about. Can someone show me how to better browse thru it? All I really want is a feed of articles from people I actually want to hear from and their recommended articles from others. Maybe that is too close to Twitter for EV.
Hey, I'm building techendo and you can follow people. Would it be interesting for you to follow people and have the option to have a different stream of their actions? Do you just want posts or other actions like comments, etc?
I got "invited" to svbtle a year and a half ago, and I have ever since used and quit it. I hated (and still do) the fact that somebody else had absolute control over what my blog looked like, and what changes I made.
Nothing so intriguing about it, really.
Edit: Also, the sign up page itself has a confusing user interface.
I have been using svtble for a few months now and when asked by a friend how it is different from Medium, I created an account on Medium to see for myself. I personally prefer svbtle's dashboard as I feel it's much smoother than Medium with the flow of: idea > draft > published. Svbtle is also less focused on images and commenting. These small details are preferable to me but to each his own.
When I checked out Medium, they had no Markdown support and very limited formatting options. Not good for code examples. Also no option to use your own domain.
Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. All in all it seems like a better option to me.
Am I the only one annoyed by the spelling of the site? I can't figure out if it is a misspelled "subtle" or Silicon Valley Beetle or something... How is it pronounced?
It doesn't annoy me any more than the trend to remove a random vowel from the name. I believe that "v" is meant to act like a fancy "u". I've seen this in other places.
Several hundred years ago, V was both a consonant and a vowel. Over time it evolved into V being a consonant, U being the vowel, and the sound that was 'VV' became W, which is why it's pronounced 'Double U' but looks like two V's.
That might not be entirely right, but I believe I'm close. You'd have to look up the evolution of the latin alphabet I suppose.
Edit: So to answer your question, I believe it's pronounced 'subtle' :)
In Latin they wrote V for what we today would pronounce U.
During the American Renaissance, architects used the old latin alphabet, which had no U. That's why you see things like PVBLIC LIBRARY in old cities. Eg: http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg
So, "Svbtle" is "Subtle" and "Bvlgari" is "Bulgari" etc.
Over the weekend, I worked on a Chrome extension (Youtube.md: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtubemd/akjklake...) that lets you embed Youtube video image easily in markdown format. The allows you to generate markdown code for Youtube video image and links it to Youtube video, when Youtube video URL is given. Note that this will not actually embed the video. Instead it will display an image from the video.
I know Svbtle supports embedding Youtube videos, but I thought this would be a good thread to mention this extension in case some people use some other system.
The best thing I did in my life was to move out of these kind of blogging services. I preffer the freedom of my hosting machine, and the beauty of Octopress.
I hate blogs without dates. A good blog article is dated properly when it was created and revised. If you want to promote a new blog platform, better date your blogs properly.
This would be cool. I wonder if you could easily hook in the Github diff. Though that would require a static blog version controlled in Github. And it wouldn't be too visually appealing.
I emailed Dustin about providing more emphasis on dates just yesterday and this was the response I got.
> We want to encourage people to write stuff that has lasting impact. I think dates can just add an extra piece of messy context for some articles. What kind of increased emphasis do you want to see?
The more I though about it, the more I realized my desire to see dates is because that is what I know. In retrospect, the best writings I've read didn't need date information to make them impactful and I admire Svbtle more for standing out this way.
I completely disagree with this point of view. I often feel that many blog articles intentionally leave out dates because they want to feel "fresh" or they pretend that they came up with some great ideas first or they want the convenience/unaccountability of fixing mistakes in previous revisions. And that is a cheating. If your ideas are fresh and timeless, they will speak for themselves.
Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are timeless.
Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.
Dates are must. They don't need to be big and bold, just to be there, somewhere. When I read a blog post, I need that information for context. It is especially true for technical blog posts. Was it written before version X? What was the context this was written in? Date helps.
It's not really about impact, but about context. If someone writes something that turns out to be obviously wrong, given the time-period, you could excuse them -- quite a few great physicists come to mind. Without that information, you might mistake them for an idiot. Or it can make a work even more impressive given the limited knowledge of that time-period.
Dates can also help when someone is talking about a technology which might have iterated past the point that their article is even relevant.
Language is very much context-dependent. Providing less context usually only helps misunderstandings.
Not everything has to be timeless. Sometimes I just want to blog about a quick workaround for a tricky technical issue I spent two days banging my head on. Such information may not be widely known, but it also probably won't be relevant in a few months.
FWIW, it looks like if you hover over a post's title, the date appears to the far left of it. But as a consumer, I don't really like it when software/sites make me discover on my own how to use it, particularly when they deviate from the norm.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadThis isn't the type of marketing copy that makes me want to use the product, and in-fact drives me away from it. Contrast with Medium's more neutral, objective copy: https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04
Personally, I prefer a more matter-of-fact approach. The less bullshit I get in a marketing pitch, the less I worry that they need to bullshit me to cover up for issues I haven't yet discovered. But then, I'm not in Svbtle's target market; I'm very unlikely to use a hosted platform to publish.
Definitely! Having just got back from watching the X Games, the comparison that springs to mind is that this sort of thing bugs me the way any opinion column published in any Aspen CO newspaper bugs me. "When I think about how perceptive and fortunate I am to have chosen to live in such a wonderful community..."
I grew up in a ski town. I bet the locals fucking love him.
I'm sure they were great people and I loved my neighborhood in the suburbs but it and Boulder were anything but diverse from an ethic or cultural point of view.
Huh. I've never thought of it in those words, its a great explanation for the tone of writing has been driving me batty. The first self-congratulatory superfluous adjective I see puts me directly into "I'm being lied to" mode.
I thought the next section of copy was even more off-putting. "It cares about your identity." Because your name appears on the article and you can use your own domain and avatar. How is that differentiated from any platform that allegedly doesn't care about your identity?
Writers shouldn’t be defined by the brands of their publishers...
And yet, every svtble blog I've seen is very clearly a svtble page first, text content second, and any consideration for personal identity a distant third. I don't really have an issue with that but why feature such a ridiculous claim?
That seems like a rather bizarre idea to attribute to Svbtle. It seems clear to me that the "you" in their copy is someone who is likely to be interested in their product. That's an extremely common wording in marketing copy.
I forgot why I don't click links to svbtle but thanks HN for reminding me why :)
Are non-undoable likes the logical progression to the likes-only-no-dislikes method of social media validation?
You cannot undo an upvote (you can unflag posts and articles though). This is particularly a problem when using HN on mobile devices where distinguishing up and down votes is all but impossible. I'll often make multiple wrong clicks trying to navigate to a link or vote on an item. It's frustrating.
Subtle's interface is doubly deceptive: it lies to the user and it misrepresents the consequences of those lies. Makes me lose a lot of trust and faith in the product, actually. As well as those who use it.
Funny how things brand you.
Aside: I think this is a great blogging platform that turns quite a few people away because of Dustin's bravado.
Considering it is svbtle, I decided to give a lot more thought to my post. If that's the effect it gives me, providing more effort and quality to my own thoughts, then it's worth it.
My first question is: "who is this for?"
The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control?
Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I couldn't tell from the blog post.
I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product is for.
Medium beat Svbtle to the punch, though.
How does having an account restrict you, in the context of being a writer wishing to publicise your work?
If you aren't already a Twitter user, it's simpler to have the option of making a Medium account.
Unless Twitter gives Medium more information about usera on authentication than I think they do, I don't know how Medium could possible verify the owners of each blog.
This is true of virtually every "good design" over the years. At the beginning people almost always thought it was superior in some way.
Were any other company responsible for making the new Mac Pro, it would have been met with devastating reviews. Correlation, however, and people somehow reach to find a way to make a case for why it is actually a good design.
Ever hear of Frog Design?
Frog Design was the main motivation behind Apple hardware design..look up its history its a great read on the true story of Industrial design at Apple
In other words, they became the most valuable company in the world, even though they have a tiny share of the market in almost every segment they're in other than the mobile handset space, because enough people are willing to pay the "Apple Tax".
I assume that this will be a Freemium product and I also think that the "pro" version will have some features that I would sooner or later need, at least that's my experience with other platforms I tested.
One example being Google's App engine, which turned out to be rather expensive compared to competitors and didn't justify that for me. Investing a lot of hours in a platform that you don't end up using is not that satisfying.
I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis.
It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products that start out with a small number of people who love it... this could also be appreciated and used by others.
I am not a serious writer, but I hate writing in square spaces ui because its distracting. I might not have been able to articulate this because I'm not a serious writer - But in hind sight I realize that I usually write in word and then paste into squarespace. Svbtle eliminates this process - it makes writing simpler.
So yes. Built for a specific sub set. But with features that everyone can appreciate.
For example, imagine if the blog post / homepage looked something like this:
"Blogging built for developers"
-"Having trouble building a technical audience?"
-"Want to properly format your posts with syntax highlighting?"
-"Need support for code snippets?"
"Then this platform is for you"
There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach.
Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.
Svbtle does have that aspect (it calls itself "a new kind of magazine"), but seems to put a lot of energy into pleasing the writers.
Using Wordpress to simply serve up my content and manage comments has been working so far. I'm in between being locked in and lazy so I haven't bothered moving to something like Ghost.
I've been using Svbtle for a while now, and for me, the killer is this, in order: On my own domain, looks great, and hosted by someone else.
I care that I'm not putting content I care about into a closed platform. I'd never post to Medium.
I'm a backend kind of developer, so knowing how to design something myself is awkward. I could pay someone to do it, but I'd still have to implement it.
While I am a backend developer, the last thing I want to do is deal with ANOTHER project to yak shave and suck up more of my time. Hosting it myself is a no-go.
It is _definitely_ for me to try and find out.
I've been wanting a very simple, minimalistic platform to blog. I _thought_ the reason I've abandoned my wordpress blog is because I dislike how complex and advanced it is. I want the simplest thing ever.
Svbtle looked like that thing since it first came out. I'll find out soon enough.
> I like it, but noticing a few problems so far. Can’t tab while writing markdown. No live preview for markdown (may or may not be a problem). No confirmation of saving changes if you close the tab/navigate away. Drag and drop to upload images works okay, but Cmd+V doesn’t.
> Fenced blocks don’t do syntax highlighting (for Go at least).
> Can’t see invisible whitespace.
> The rest is good.
> Also, I don't see a way to export your content, nor a way to delete your account.
It's similar to svbtle in its simplicity.
How well has Silvrback held up under heavy load?
I also (and this is purely a personal thing) find that much whitespace like staring into a lamp I suspect I'd be using something like stylish in short order (might be nice to have something like a night mode, readability does this really well see here.. http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png )
That it handles zooming really all the way up to an insane level is great (I'm 34 this year and my eyes are crap..) and it looks really nice on my old Nexus 7 1st gen.
Kudos :)
The atom feed will represent the compiled and rendered end content. If I have, say, source code snippets, that leaves me in a position of needing to parse out the original code so I can redo it in whatever new highlighting syntax my new blog uses. I might end up with resized images instead of originals, etc etc etc. It's not a real substitute for a proper backend export.
This is why I'm such a huge fan of Octopress and nothing has been able to pull me away from it. Everything's in a git repo. Backups are one command. All my original text is safe in Markdown format.
It might not look as cool as Medium or Svbtle, or have all the features, but it's relatively easy to use, and more importantly immune to platform lock-in.
[1] http://blog.getpelican.com/
I'm hoping that this trend will be catch on and will get more hosted services supporting export functionality in the future.
[0] https://github.com/natew/obtvse2
Also, did you really just index your citations by zero? :)
Doesn't everybody?
And this time it's going to be done right!
But in general, Wordpress is rife with inconsistent UIs, plugins that cause each other problems, and attempting to be all things to all people. It's moved way, way past being just a blog engine.
Master index? What for?
Chronological display of posts? Tags? You have so much content you need so much stuff to organize it?
Don't need menus, headers, consistent style. Use plain html.
Comments? God no. You'll have spam, you'll have to manage it. What you want is a contact page with your email address and your phone number. Everyone knows how to use those.
Search? This means you have too much stuff. Trim, keep the good stuff only.
Analytics? Server logs.
In addition to that, I've found Google+ to follow some of the people that write about topics I am interested in.
Nothing so intriguing about it, really.
Edit: Also, the sign up page itself has a confusing user interface.
Now I use Medium and I have no interest in it — and most people I know (who blog) do the same these days.
Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. All in all it seems like a better option to me.
Why?
Oops.. I was using wp-svbtle all this time. Ah well, same thing to me :)
That might not be entirely right, but I believe I'm close. You'd have to look up the evolution of the latin alphabet I suppose.
Edit: So to answer your question, I believe it's pronounced 'subtle' :)
During the American Renaissance, architects used the old latin alphabet, which had no U. That's why you see things like PVBLIC LIBRARY in old cities. Eg: http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg
So, "Svbtle" is "Subtle" and "Bvlgari" is "Bulgari" etc.
U and V have a long complicated history. If you'd like to learn more: http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv....
I know Svbtle supports embedding Youtube videos, but I thought this would be a good thread to mention this extension in case some people use some other system.
> We want to encourage people to write stuff that has lasting impact. I think dates can just add an extra piece of messy context for some articles. What kind of increased emphasis do you want to see?
The more I though about it, the more I realized my desire to see dates is because that is what I know. In retrospect, the best writings I've read didn't need date information to make them impactful and I admire Svbtle more for standing out this way.
Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are timeless.
Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.
Dates can also help when someone is talking about a technology which might have iterated past the point that their article is even relevant.
Language is very much context-dependent. Providing less context usually only helps misunderstandings.
"Lasting impact" that can't stand up for itself, needs to generate a little confusion first.