Live data from Hacker News

The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

medium.com

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#41
post #35
post #7

Another walled garden? What is the advantage of posting to this service? Increased readership? Huge font? I don't see IP terms posted anywhere... Or any reason to be excited about this.

Terms of Service: https://medium.com/c/675ebe56ac25

That's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#43
post #41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terms of Service: https://medium.com/c/675ebe56ac25

That's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?

Yep, its linked from a couple of pages but needs to be more obvious. Will fix.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#44
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Twitter's traditionally one of the best examples of real-world cool URIs." Do you mind expanding on this? I thought hashbangs were a rape and pillage of URI convention.

I wasn't thinking of hashbangs, which will ultimately be noise in the history of Twitter. (I could get into a debate about why they weren't that bad, but it's all (HTML5) history now, so I'll move on.) I was thinking mostly about the clean, namespaced, REST scheme for their API, which you can see at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api . And it's not just a separate API, as it corresponds closely to the website URLs too.…

This is really interesting. I don't do as much REST API work as I'd like to, and I assumed twitter's scheme was standard rather than a shining exception. Thanks for teaching me something new :)

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#45
post #38

Looking at the response headers, the powered-by header says "Food" (x-powered-by: Food). Is this a new web framework or just a little joke?

You can read about how we chose our tech stack here: http://branch.com/b/choosing-the-best-technology-for-my-webs...

(Seriously, though, it was just the first thing that came into my head when setting up the other X-headers.)

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#46
post #38

Looking at the response headers, the powered-by header says "Food" (x-powered-by: Food). Is this a new web framework or just a little joke?

Probably a joke. They are using Nginx, and you can easily add a custom header using the add_header directive[1] in the Nginx config.

e.g. add_header "X-Powered-By" "Food";

[1]http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpHeadersModule#add_header

I sometimes throw in these kind of headers for fun on my own sites.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#47
post #43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?

Yep, its linked from a couple of pages but needs to be more obvious. Will fix.

Thanks - I didn't know if it was intentional. If I go to the site, the only link I have is to provide access to twitter. It does give it the feel of "somewhere I'm probably not supposed to be," which is why I was wondering if that was the intent.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#49

Looks interesting - to me it seems similar in a lot of ways to svbtle, at least as far as what they are trying to do. Its a small thing, but I'm somewhat turned off by the urls - urls like https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...

So I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but I think W3's strict URIs are only a few years from being less important for web applications and only being important for TLDs and web "sites." Reasoning: Chrome's web store and the rise of single page applications that rely on things other than URIs.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#50

Okay, I love the simplicity behind Obvious' work, but I'm seriously confused about what the purpose behind some of these projects. Lift - http://lift.do/ - tagline is "achieve anything" - give us your email. Nothing else. Branch - http://branch.com/ - was on HN the other day and has a pretty video, but I have no idea what they actually do as a product/service. Medium - http://medium.com/ - despite the nice blog post,…

It appears they are missing Jack. He was, apparently, behind the idea for Twitter, and now you can see his new venture took off and never stopped ever since. This being said, I think Branch is going to be one of the most influential products in coming years. Death to the monologues.
Post reply on HN