Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apologies, we’ll tighten that up. We only want social auth to streamline onboarding.
Cool. I assumed it was unintentional. Once you do that I'm in.
Give us 24 hours. Will reply once it’s sorted.
Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
101–110 of 142 posts
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use Ghost. It's self-hosted and gives all the functionality you need for beginners and advanced users alike. Running it on https://sdan.xyz/blog and it's fantastic. I get RSS/subscriptions ( https://sdan.xyz/subscribe)/podcasts/a whole plethora of integrations super easily. And since it's self hosted, you don't need to worry about it ever going down (unlike if Able.bio ever does). Also, Lighthouse gives Ghost blogs t…
You can even make your deployment easier by using a static site generator like Hugo.
Ghost also supports creating static sites, although I haven't gone that route.
Hugo is a valid option though!
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#103I think folks might be more comfortable switching to this if they understood the business model (or philanthropic finding source). This platform will only have value if it scales (and therefore has substantial costs). How will those costs be covered? What about paying you for your time you spend building and maintaining it? Looking forward to learning more about your plans, and having an alternative to the existing e…
Here's the link you're looking for: https://able.bio/about#business-model
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substan…
> all non-tech Medium blogs > link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service. But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this p…
Are there any marine biology blogs on LinkedIn?
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#105Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog
For the less-technical crowd, you can put markdown files in a Gitlab repo. You don't even have to know how to use Git. You can create and edit files without leaving the website.
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#106It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.
Netlify is exactly that with Gatsby, I have two blogs running on them.
Many themes have now deploy to Netlify buttons:
https://github.com/netlify-templates/gatsby-starter-netlify-...
Many themes support https://www.contentful.com/ as a backend.
The only thing that's a little concerning to me is the separation of domains: Hosting on a freemium service which deploys me a Node/React based static site generator that can connect to a third party headless CMS. That's why I still use markdown as the source of the content.
Too many moving parts, but at the same time if one goes down for good, I can fix it quite easily.
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#107Cool, just the other day I was looking for a place to quickly paste the longish top comment from the "who wants to get fired" thread [1] in order to be able to read it reasonably formatted. I've published the story here and given the original author control: https://able.bio/throwthrowthrowyourboat/my-grand-ulcer-name... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21141785
OMG, I feel an ulcer developing just from reading that story. Thanks for posting!
Reminds me of that 2 million LOC monstrosity someone once commented on an ASK HN about the worst codebase they’ve ever seen.
Btw, there are some duplicate paragraphs in the article that are probably worth trimming out. Search for “Contract arrives, I sit down with COO and CFO and explain that we have been duped.“
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market. Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on dev…
> hit the casual crowd Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content. Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles. Every Reddit post has more substan…
Focus is great, but fluff exists everywhere. Tech and non-tech alike (although there are far more sub divisions...). Even tech.
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#109Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog
This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market. Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on dev…
Medium is absolute garbage for discovery. Worthless trash.
My typical post on Medium got 5,000 to 10,000 views. I’ve had a few break 100k. Medium provided roughly zero views. All my views came from Reddit, HN, Twitter, or Google.
If you’re using Medium for discovery you’re wasting your time.
Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium
#110Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post. Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property. If Google sear…
High SERP ratings come from multiple things: 1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in) 2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite…
Page load time should include the time it takes to clear away the nag screen before you can see the content. That is easily 2000ms for most people.