This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you blog with a third party service, eventually your blog will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or whatever happened in this instance (google forgot to renew a domain?). If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care.
This reminds me of the now-obsolete "Windows Live Writer"[1], where you could write everything on your Windows machine and "push" it to Sharepoint, Blogger, LiveWriter, Wordpress and much more. Ultimately, it got an open-source fork called "Open Live Writer"[2].
It sounds like a nice idea - a "Live Writer on steroids". Could be neat.
For anyone wanting to take it for a spin, openlivewriter.org seems to be down since at least May, but .com works, and is also maintained by the same people.
I have been using Windows Live Writer since around 2008 on a WP blog and just recently switched to Open Live Writer. I can't think about blogging without this tool. The fact that it allows me write offline and push my article to my blog with proper formatting is a big plus for me.
Honestly it doesn't sound like what you're describing. It's an editor and publisher for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, etc. Basically MarsEdit but for Windows.
What you're describing seems to be bundling an editor, a static site generator, an S3 syncing service and an S3/Cloudflare onboarding guide.
Thanks, yes you describe my concept quite well. Admittedly i'm not very familiar with OLW so made some assumptions. So perhaps it could be said that if i developed my idea, there's more 'value' in it than OLW in that sense.
There used to be several desktop blogging programs at the past, both commercial and free/open source, but they died because apparently putting everything in the browser is sexier or something.
Anyway, here is one i found out recently and seems to be able to do the job:
Having said that, the first thing a friend of mine (who has managed a few blogs professionally) asked when i mentioned it to him was "can you make posts from your mobile?". Of course the answer is "no" since this runs as a desktop application, manages everything locally and just generates HTML files that can optionally upload/sync to your server for you. But apparently every single non-technical client he had wanted to use their phone to write blog posts way more often than their computer.
And yes, i know this also explains the "because apparently putting everything in the browser is sexier or something" part i wrote at the top, but, dammit, i do not care about mobiles at all, do not go and kill stuff i (might) like.
(though TBH there are several things i dislike about Publii, e.g. the themes are both ugly and too overcomplicated to work with and modify and the program is written in Electron with for real benefit - it doesn't do real WYSIWYG, just a rich text editor almost with the same capabilities as the one you could find even in Visual Basic 4 and it doesn't even preview the site inside it but launches your browser instead, but there isn't really any other alternative that i know of and at the end it seems to work... though i'm itching to go and write my own :-P)
Ok first up, i think your blog title is hilarious "Yet Another Dev Blog That I Will Abandon After a While" :)
And very excited to see some love for Paint Shop Pro! Ah memories.
As for Publii, yes it really does appear to be everything I was thinking of making. Except it's Electron and I was thinking native - which users wouldn't notice likely.
Really interesting to hear that people want to post from mobile. I must be in a developers' bubble - i assumed this kind of thing would be done from a desktop! You've really got me thinking there. I guess you could totally do it from mobile. But then you have to fight the app store's distribution/marketing model. Which isn't appealing - at some point you have to ask yourself 'would I just make an easier living as an electrician than do this?'.
Again, interesting to hear your shortcomings with Publii. I think the killer feature would be doing it all from mobile. Which is fine I guess, but then how do you get your data to desktop, backups, etc etc. Lots to consider!
> I guess you could totally do it from mobile. But then you have to fight the app store's distribution/marketing model.
I don't know much about the mobile world, so this may be a stupid question, but could you route around the app store problem by making a progressive web app?
I assume a backend of some sort would be necessary, since JS in the browser is a pretty limited environment, but if Chalkinator Desktop is handling your server setup anyway, it could install a personal backend on it for you, and the PWA could talk to that.
My skillset is native iOS apps so it'd be going against my strengths to make a PWA. Plus i'm skeptical of their usability. Having said all that: I mulled it over overnight, and i could use an extra private S3 bucket as the 'backend' for my app, therefore having both desktop and mobile versions with the same 'drafts' prior to publishing. That could really work I think, however it's more work than i was thinking of doing.
This is a great idea and a desktop app is the right fit for a product that aims to give sovereignty to the user. The app should be able to generate HTML files and then upload them to one of the supported providers (netlify, private vps, etc), and at the same time it should also support a list of DNS providers so that it can point the user owned domain to the correct hosting provider. That way the user maintains ownership of the domain and can switch hosting providers at the click of a button.
This means that you as the app developer would be out of the loop and couldn't easily sell the user out. You would only be there to provide updates, include more providers etc.
edit: reading the description of you software better, I think this is what you are going for. The thing you haven't added yet is domain management.
Thanks for reading my idea! Yes i think you understand the concept pretty well. I'd like to be 'out of the loop' as much as possible: Write what you like! As for domain management, I think my app could help with that but I suspect that since it's a once-off thing, a couple of tutorial videos for how to do it yourself with amazon or azure would hopefully do the trick.
The most famous still maintained offline blog editor is Open Live Writer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Live_Writer , previously known as Windows Live Writer). It's Windows-only, which is a big improvement on average-joe-managability and multi-decade-perspectivity fronts to your idea of macOS-only app.
If the problem is longevity, then they should just be able to easily export the contents to a format that can easily be archived and then turned back into a working blog with another platform.
Most blogs are as simple as markdown files, with maybe some complexity in referring to other media files like images, and a key/value map in the form of front matter. That's not very difficult to serialize.
Regarding longevity. Here is a nice setup that should last well until after you are dead:
Write your articles as plain .txt when you don't need images. Or as handwritten html when you do (use relative links and dump the images into a subfolder)
You can simply have pre-made templates for this that you copy and paste manually.
You can even add custom metadata so that it is searchable in some future incarnation of archive.org (doubt they will ever break the existing metadata even if at some decades down the line someone decides to redesign the whole thing)
archive.org is becoming such an important "ark" of knowledge that in theory there will be a very high chance a copy is preserved somewhere for decades to come. (barring some large scale digital societal collapse)
I was thinking about that issue too! My idea was that my app would have an 'export to Hugo' option so at any time you've got that as an 'escape hatch' or upgrade path, so no risk.
The other day I followed an HN link and downloaded https://www.zettlr.com/ . It's "basically" a manager of Markdown files, and its syntax highlighting was compatible with the Hugo Markdown syntax. For a minute I wondered if I could take the source code of the editor and make it understand my Hugo-specific shortcodes (I put up a lot of pictures so I have homebrew {{ <gallery> }} and {{ <figure> }} shortcodes), but that's in my ever-extending "To Do Someday" list.
The idea would be: it would read the Markdown as I write it, let Hugo render it, and return the HTML to be rendered in the editor window.
Looking at your editor, it really looks like Zettlr (I'm guessing they're both Electron apps).
I guess you have 2 almost separate problems: the editor and the hosting. On the topic of hosting, I guess if a "blogger" can get his own domain name, the actual infrastructure can be swapped under it (and the data republished from the local machine), as long as the reader can load the blog using the known URL, it's fine.
Yes, my app would be a lot like Zettlr but tailored specifically to blogging, with the publishing built-in; it appears to me that Zettlr is more a generic .md editor.
FWIW: my app isn't Electron, it'd be native macOS, that's just my skillset. Maybe i should just use Electron so it could run on windows/linux to be honest.
Yes, the plan would be for the blogger to get their own domain. Bloggers generally already do that when setting up with Wordpress so i don't think that's a problem.
Hugo 0.62 added Markdown rendering hooks so you can do custom processing of a standard markdown image. I was able to use this to get rid of my <figure> shortcodes. The render hook generates the figure tag and also uses Hugo image processing to generate multiple image sizes for srcset.
This way I'm able to keep the markdown completely standard which makes it easier to move to a new platform in the future.
I wouldn't do this as desktop app. That way you are fighting the existing ecosystem. Instead have a webservice that eats the RSS feed of an existing blog and mirrors it, also keeping track of uploaded images, and then when need be spins up a blog instance on digitalocean.
Wouldn't know how to price that, and with RSS often containing just a few items you'd need to think about that when setting up the blog. Though maybe blogspot supports range requests for RSS?
How do you ensure your domain name still remains registered after you're dead? Registrars only allow 10 years worth of registration at once and all the solutions I've seen generally rely on you putting details in your will and trusting family members to continue maintaining. In 50 years time, I have much more faith in google.com still resolving than my custom, boutique domain.
I wish there was a service where you could just buy like, a $1000 US 100 year T-Bill and use the payments from that to guarantee your domain remains alive/hosted for at least 100 years.
Oh that's not really the problem I'm trying to solve here. Mainly my concern is 'i want to have a blog that spans my entire career' which has been personally difficult due to posterous dying, wordpress upgrades and hacks, etc etc. Static has really stabilised things over the last decade for me.
I'm actually working on one of those third party services :) (see my signature). IMO it makes more sense to have a CMS in the cloud which takes care of backups, etc, and can be accessed from any device.
I agree about the risk of the blog going away in the future which is something that simply cannot be avoided if you're relying on someone else to publish your content. Anyway, we're going to offer an easy way to export your data (maybe markdown files or HTML files or something like that).
If you want full independence and have the skills then yeah a static site is probably the best option. But even for people with technical skills it's a hassle to setup, design/buy a template, figure out the best hosting, no CMS, etc.
Good luck with pluma! I agree CMS in the cloud has strengths such as backups etc. Just in my experience that cloud projects seem to have a half-life of around 5 years :)
I was thinking the same as you: Having an export to some format (i was thinking Hugo or Jekyll) to give people that assurance that there's a plan B if things go bad.
As for the hassle to setup etc, I totally agree! That's a large part of what my idea would solve. And even with technical skills it's a hassle, i agree - which is why i initially thought posing this at devs would be good. But now i think they tend to DIY these things so perhaps not a great target market.
Wouldn't this mean that you just become another blogging service to trust? Even if the users have their own domains, if you close up shop, their blogs will close since you have all the contracts with AWS/whatever. How will you manage the transfer of them to the users?
Or is the idea that the tool registers an account to a server provider for the user? So the user has to pay both you (for the tool) and the server provider (for the server).
Maybe I have misunderstood the aim? In any case, due to what you mentioned, I think it's a difficult niche, since technical people can set up their own and I'd guess most non-technical people don't really care enough.
The idea is that there's no trust required: My app handholds people through the process of setting up on AWS/Azure, then it uploads to their account via their API key. So if i close up shop, they wouldn't even notice (although they might notice a lack of new features after a while).
So yes they'd be paying me and the server. However the server fees would be cents a month. I would aim to present this as a strength to the user: you get billed direct by AWS/Azure because you're not at ransom to me - you hold the keys to the kingdom.
I suspect you're right though: Technical people will DIY, and nontechnical won't care, and will simply use Wordpress (it's the IBM of blogging: "nobody got fired for buying Wordpress")
You're spot on right, especially with the pace of change in macOS. I was thinking that i could angle this as a good reason to charge for the product: "If you want this app to stick around for the long term, paying will ensure that". Combined with some sort of code escrow perhaps, plus a hugo or jekyll export as an 'offramp', i think it could be presented as reasonably 'safe-enough'.
Exactly. Windows and Android apps last forever. Not so much in Apple land.
It's not only that though. For example, something could be deprecated in the AWS SDK. If the app has to deploy somewhere it will be coupled to that too.
No i haven't - having just had a brief look at it, it seems to be exactly what i was proposing (except it's not a native app, which is probably neither here nor there for most users).
I seem to remember someone trying to build a blogging service on top of Matrix. I don't really understand the specifics but I assume since it's decentralised and federated, any other home server could then connect to your home sever and also host it/mirror it?
That doesn't sound like his idea. Posthaven says they plan to exist long-term, but they aren't doing it in a way that if they do fail, you don't lose your blog.
Thanks for the pointer! Yes, that's the concept that i'm aiming for, except that the user would bring their own hosting for even more chance of longevity (i assume posthaven has a bus-factor of 1 or maybe 2).
The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/
Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)