Honest, good faith question here. One stated goal of building this is because you "deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network." How does this solve that? Keeping in touch is not about the web presence, it's about the network. How does this work differently than something like about.me?
Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
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Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#22Personal websites should be personalized tho. It's like Facebook vs Myspace. Myspace allowed you to easily personalize your page, and there were tons of really cool unique pages. Facebook killed personal expression; you get to pick a cover photo, a personal photo, make posts, and that's it. Then they dominated the world, and an entire generation grew up never knowing that the internet used to be fun.
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#23Can you talk a bit more about the tech stack you are using for this and how long it took you from the time you started working on it until you had it up and running?
Sure! Tech stack is Rails with Hotwire on the frontend. I'm hosting on Render.com, and using their custom domains support to issue certificates. It looks like I had an MVP done in May [1], then spend the Summer doing lots of testing and refinement. Speed was a big focus - I wanted sites to be ultra-quick. I do this with a mix of caching in Memcached, image optimization source sets, CDN, and more. Plus, I'm dynamicall…
Would you be interested in upselling users to have their own community? It’s an open source solution that supports events, shows, and services (that you can pay to book). See what I mean at https://qbix.com
You can click on the example apps in there to see them on mobile/desktop.
Discourse is great forum software. And Wordpress is great publishing software. Qbix integrates with those too. I can see your site to eventually attract a lot of people who want to get paid for their products or services.
(However, I realize they can use calendly for booking events, zoom for the actual videoconferencing, youtube for videos, stripe for selling subscriptions, and maybe a Facebook/Telegram/Discord group for customers to connect… but then they also wouldn’t need Entri since they can make a Facebook or Linktree profile.)
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#24Honest, good faith question here. One stated goal of building this is because you "deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network." How does this solve that? Keeping in touch is not about the web presence, it's about the network. How does this work differently than something like about.me?
This has an email newsletter built in. People can subscribe via the site and you can publish newsletters through their back end.
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#25Interesting that I can immediately tell it's a Tailwind website, with the colors, Inter font, dot grid background etc.
Regarding the content itself, looks good. Looks like it's following the classic $8/m model for hooking up a custom domain, like every other site builder.
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#26Looks pretty good. Congrats. You selected good examples that make it feel relatable for me. Don’t love the price. I’m a big fan of small once/year pricing which makes it an impulse purchase… to justify this at $8/month I would need to actively be doing something with it
On the checkout page, there is an $80/year option. I just didn't want to complicate the marketing page, but it seems like I should add the optional yearly pricing there.
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#27Honest, good faith question here. One stated goal of building this is because you "deleted most social media, but still wanted a way to keep in touch with friends and my network." How does this solve that? Keeping in touch is not about the web presence, it's about the network. How does this work differently than something like about.me?
Yes, like the other comment mentions - there's a built-in newsletter that also acts like a light blog. Check out how I use it on my personal site: https://www.philipithomas.com/
I also custom-generate OpenGraph images for each page and post, which makes them look great when shared on social networks. My philosophy is that you should be able to write once, then share everywhere - which I chat more about in the launch post here:
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#28Personal websites should be personalized tho. It's like Facebook vs Myspace. Myspace allowed you to easily personalize your page, and there were tons of really cool unique pages. Facebook killed personal expression; you get to pick a cover photo, a personal photo, make posts, and that's it. Then they dominated the world, and an entire generation grew up never knowing that the internet used to be fun.
I would like to see more personal websites in the world! And, the reality is that most site builders are not accessible. Single-digit activation rates are pretty common. And, most people won't spend thousands of dollars worth of money or time to build a personal site.
So - I don't intend for Postcard to be used by everybody. But, for people who want a personal site but don't have the time or skills to customize a site - I made Postcard!
Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
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Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website
#30this is cool! i've always struggled supporting custom domains. what dns wizardry does one need to do to support custom domains?