I have a Wordpress blog right now that sucks, and frankly I'm terrified at the thought of making changes to it because Wordpress was never designed for maintainability. Hard-corded absolute URLs in the database are the kind of malpractice that is endemic in IT, and make it very hard for me to copy my blog to test.myblog.com, upgrade to a new version of Wordpress, then change my theme.
(For any system I develop for a customer, on my own account, having development, staging and production servers is an absolute requirement)
I'm afraid of FUBARing my old blog if I upgrade my Wordpress because Wordpress has pluginitis.
I suppose I could switch to some other blog software, but now there are so many options I could spend two months just screwing around with different blog packages.
What I really want is something that cuts through the complexity. I could hire a local webdev shop to do a blog or CMS customization for me around $3000, and expect to put hours into requirements work, or I could buy a product like this for $50 a year and figure that's worth one hour of my time spent reading documentation for yet another off-brand blog.
Based on the app's features, I would say the audience is composed of tech-savvy developers / designers who want a lot of control over their content and want to establish their own brand.
I think many of those people will be inclined to blog on their own websites, where they can do all the hacking they want. Blogs are easy to establish, especially if you're shooting for a minimalistic feel.
Having said all this, I wonder if there's a way to make Silvrback available as a service that people can apply to their own sites? ...I'll admit that business isn't my strong suit, but I think this would be a great way to go if it can be made financially viable.
I'd like to have a favicon that's not a gorilla, but I used to have an O(ctopress) for my favicon. Not a big deal.
Questions:
* I like that you support tags. How do you browse tags?
* Customizable URL slugs: so if I want to date my archive URLs I have to manually type in '/archive/2013/10/07/slug' each time? Is there any way to template the archive URLs?
* How does your archive page scale when you have thousands of posts? https://dsowers.silvrback.com/archive
* As others have mentioned, I'd really prefer a free trial than shell out money (I understand it's not much) and feel like I wasted it if I poke around for a few minutes and find it's not for me.
* I had a question about exporting data but someone already asked it :)
* "Your homepage... will show the latest three posts in full." Is this customizable? I often have a bunch of short posts that mostly serve to keep track of stuff I read and find it later. I'd rather show the last, say, week's worth of content instead of a fixed number of posts.
* Full text search?
The tags are there to give the reader extra meaning about the article. For example, you could tell someone to read an article first in the tag. However, I believe I will offer a way to filter by tags soon. This wasn't their primary purpose, though. They aren't like stack overflow tags. They are more like post-it-notes to guide your readers.
If you don't want to use the auto-generated friendly slug that Silvrback makes for your article, then you would have to edit it to your liking in "advanced post settings." I don't want this to be bloated with features so I don't have a 'slug template' save option. 98% of my users wouldn't need this option. Sorry :)
With thousands of posts the page will be paginated. I'm actually still implementing this. Should be ready soon.
If you do buy a subscription and don't like it, just email me and I will refund you.
I've had to stage an emergency exodus of blog content from third party hosts more than once because reasons (most recently: Thanks OVH billing department!), so having content in a non-exportable site scares me a little, especially when I'll be using that site as my primary writing area.
I hadn't touched this server in weeks, so they generated their invoice, the notification email got filed away as spam, and the server was disconnected (again the message being filed as spam).
It wasn't until almost a week after that I noticed something was up and called them. They advised me to open a ticket, I did, one day later the server disappeared from their control panel, and I have yet to receive a reply on that ticket.
The missing the billing and their messages getting spam filtered is completely on me, but the not answering a ticket and linking ticket-creating-account-ness the payment status of the server is totally on them.
Back to Hetzner, it seems. I didn't lose anything but my blog (which is Octopress and thankfully backed up to Bitbucket) and a couple of VMs I used for learning things.
Then again, I suppose I'm not part of the intended audience.
Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.
You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card surcharge", for example.
Paying sign ups also increased, but not quite as much.
Particularly when software is work-related, the amount of time it takes to evaluate something is usually far more than the product costs. For instance, I'd expect to spend more than an hour writing and promoting my serious post, and if I valued my time at (a very low) $50 an hour, the time costs more than the product does.
(The perverse thing about enterprise software sales is that the same thing is true about $50,000 software purchases)
Anyhow, I can say that 95% of the time I sign up for a 30-day free trial, 30 days go by and I never get around to evaluating the product because time is more dear to me than money.
I still don't get the 'large print' trend. Yes, I've read all the so-called 'pro's', but the content still looks ridiculously sparse to me.
I find a website with 'old-fashioned' 12px or lower text is like me holding my iPhone at arm's length. Don't get it.
Curious as to your monitor size/res and whether you use the computer leaning forwards/backwards. I'm a 28yr old with good eyesight, I lean back in my chair.
Also wonder if a lot of hackers are biased towards small text because they're used to their IDEs/terminals which default to pretty tiny fonts.
Don't know about 'hacker bias', but yes, I'm a dev that's grown up on xterms (on huge monitors), and use IDE's fullscreen at fontsizes a lot smaller than those of a medium blog (now _that_ would be a waste of screen space ;))
I see your point, but imho font sizes like OPs feel like a large print edition book held about a foot in front of my face. I guess it's mostly a matter of taste.
http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/ vs http://blog.kristian.io/
To be honest, I think it is a bit too minimal. With the tagline "own your brand", I find it strange that the site is completely white and generic - what exactly is my brand then? Not even my name or picture is in the header.
I was also hoping for the posibility to write a synopsis for each blog article, as I some very long and technical articles that I don't want to be displayed in its full length on the front page. This unfortunately isn't possible.
Furhtermore, I find the menu thing extremely strange. It took me a while to discover it and I don't think it's very user friendly.
I have to say that if the above things are not fixed, I don't think I would want to move my blog at all. Fortunately I signed up for the monthly plan.
Edit: Also, it would be cool to let me store the markdown documents in Dropbox, so I could use a proper editor (and also for import/export).
I think it would be really cool if you could use the header from the bio page, for the rest of the site as well - then I think it would be less anonymous, e.g.: http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/bio
In the end the menu isn't a big problem - but I would really like the opportunity to put my name or a blog name on the top of the page.
http://jasonlotito.com/over-the-us
I should note that I've been very happy with Silvrback. It's easy to use, fast, and works as expected.
Silvrback © 2013
I could be wrong, but I think Silvrback probably has much better syntax highlighting than Ghost (do they have it at all?) and it gives you a bio page so you can consolidate your brand.
I'll take having an open source, easy to install, fully controllable platform over closed any day of the week, especially for something simple like a blog platform, and blogs are not about products unless that is what you consider yourself.
- I work part-time as a contractor, and part-time on my side project. While I have a ton of blog design ideas, I lost a personal bet that I'd have them done by the end of September.
- I have had lots of posts backlogged over the past several months. I was starting to have a fear of posting due to the design of my older site.
- Octopress is wonderful, but to use it right you really need to be familiar with tagging your repos correctly / using a separate repo for your posts. I didn't want to think about all this in addition to all my usual pickiness about the front-end design.
- I really didn't want to fiddle with wordpress. This is a personal blog, not something I plan to delegate to other content writers.
- As glennf and others have mentioned, I didn't want to use medium, or any other free site. I want my own domain to be used, and occasionally look at google analytics.
So far, I'm happy with silvrback. Liking how it properly scales images when I use refer to them within a list, Markdown is the first class citizen, and psychologically I'm not thinking too hard about blog design for now. Yes, there's some UX annoyances with the initial release of silvrback, but I'm sure Damian's working on them.
Will I still be using it in couple years? Maybe not, but for a site that's only got a couple posts and already gotten a couple thousand visits and mentions from sites like hackaday & packlite.tumblr in the past week I'm happy enough with it.
I really like this layout compared to doing it myself with Octopress. It's much more convenient to have most of the decisions made for me because I tend to get into optimization paralysis.
This is what we're trying to do with http://markdawn.com/. The reason I'm leaving a comment here is that the app is not ready for a “Show HN” yet (or maybe it's just a designer/engineer complex for not doing that at this time).
> Full ownership of your brand and data.
This is the only thing not provided by anyone else afaik.