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Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

able.bio

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Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#111

Post by throwyourboat »

new_here wrote: post #107
throwyourboat wrote: post #94

Cool, 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.“

mh sorry, that may have been my mistake… I edited it on my phone

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#112

Post by joelrunyon »

zschuessler wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just 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…

Discoverability isn't real.

It's a term people use when they want to abdicate their marketing efforts.

Whether you use your own platform or build on someone else's - discoverability almost never "just happens." People put a ton of work into being discovered "organically."

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#113

Post by Minenash »

new_here wrote: post #66
fractalf wrote: post #59

The editor looks awesome! Great work :) ..any chanse on open sourcing the editor?

Check out ProseMirror.

Two small suggestions, there's a "placeholder" text for the new post title, but not the content. You also can't hit the enter key to start writing, so at first I couldn't figure out how to write.

The other one is to make the inside is your favicon white instead of transparent. It looks good on light themes, but the A is almost invisible on my dark theme.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#115

Post by paulddraper »

zschuessler wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just 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…

> Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

Could you syndicate?

For programming topics, I've done that with DZone for years.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#116

Post by Minenash »

Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider (*).

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#117

Post by new_here »

Minenash wrote: post #116

Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider ( *).

That’s an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and most users are wary of this. Thoughts?

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#118

Post by Minenash »

new_here wrote: post #117
Minenash wrote: post #116

Since, you can sign in with GitHub, it would be cool if it could sync/backup posts to a repo. Since in the end, the posts are mostly markdown, each post could be a .md file in the repo, with the title, subtitles, img header, and tags, in either or a code block. Or as plain text and a horizonal divider ( *).

That’s an awesome idea! Would need to request write permissions though and most users are wary of this. Thoughts?

Can you have different permissions from different users? If so it could be a setting to "backup to github", and then request that permission then.

Is there a place I can put suggestions/requests? Because I have some for the editor.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#119

Post by bhl »

zschuessler wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just 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…

Personal blogging and discover-ability are reconcilable: why doesn't someone build an aggregator where people can submit their essays and write-ups with RSS feeds?

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#120

Post by PatrolX »

The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost.

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost is the best option.

https://ghost.org/

Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ score right out of the box.

If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the blogging space.

I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a "switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.

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