Show HN: A Really Simple Blog Platform

http://www.throwww.com/

by sfard • 14 years ago

19 30 14 years ago

throwww.com

sfard13• 14 years ago

http://www.throwww.com/a/1

Here's why I built Throwww.

presidentender• 14 years ago

It links to '1 more articles,' even though it's the only one.

My anonymous post was immediately "viewed 2 times."

This is still a nifty little tool.

sfard13• 14 years ago

Yah, hypothetically there should be more there. Just kept it in there for now to show that "more articles" shows up when you post with twitter. Though I really shouldn't have been so lazy and just written a 2nd article.

And thank you!

sfard13• 14 years ago

Oh and the viewed 2 times is sheer laziness. I set the viewcount to 1 upon creation to avoid potential future errors like dividing viewcount by a number etc. And then when it opens it becomes 2.

jamiecurle• 14 years ago

Nice, I'm working on something similar myself and it's also in Django.

You might want to switch off DEBUG=True in your settings if you're expecting HN to come knocking :)

sfard13• 14 years ago

Thank you, and good call :)

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

Nice to use, simple.

http://www.throwww.com/a/w

is a repost of mine to test, feel free to delete. I only posted anon as I have no twitter acount

1) How do I edit an anonymous post once made? Perhaps a cookie allowing editing from the same IP as posting for half an hour? Do twitter log ins get to edit?

2) How is the url scheme going to grow. 26^2 at present. Will it be 26^n automatically?

sfard13• 14 years ago

Thanks, and why would I delete it?

1) You can't edit anonymous posts as of right now. Good suggestion though, I could just use a unique identifier to allow you to edit within the same session. If people besides me actually start using this, I'll definitely add that. 2) Yah, it's 26^n

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

"Thanks, and why would I delete it?"

No reason just the idea that when you 'launch with ordinary people' having tonnes of 'testing posts' might be annoying?

I like to use a little formatting now and again, italics &c. So I will try that in a bit.

456976 for four letters should keep you going for a bit :-) Er, are you going to skip over certain three and four letter urls?

leeHS• 14 years ago

I really like this. Clean and simple. Would be nice if I wasn't forced to use twitter to track my blogs though. What about an equally clean and simple user dashboard?

sfard13• 14 years ago

The original use case I had in mind was to allow twitter users to write more than 140 characters. I've since drifted away from that, and a plain ol' user registration option might make a lot more sense now.

As for user dashboards, there's just this for now http://throwww.com/u/sfard

sachleen• 14 years ago

You should make "1 more articles by sfard" a link to take you back to your user page. I missed the list on the right at first glance.

bpierre2• 14 years ago

Nice! I like simple websites like this, with a clear purpose, and no authentication (I built http://scri.ch/ some times ago, it allows users to quickly draw sketches and share them).

Do you plan to generate revenues, and if so, how?

Your logo reminds me of a mix between Sparrow and the Svbtle logos:

http://sprw.me/mac.php

https://svbtle.com/

Keep up the good work!

sfard13• 14 years ago

Thanks, man! (assuming you are a man).

Nice scri.ch btw. You still working on it?

And as for revenue etc, I just built this for fun last week cause I was tired of how Posterous kept getting more bloated every time I used it. No thoughts about this as a business, really.

bpierre2• 14 years ago

I am a man :-)

I’m still working on it occasionally (it’s an Open Source Software): https://github.com/bpierre/scri.ch

I asked for the revenue because we thought about it after the initial scri.ch release, but we came to the conclusion that there is no real market here. It does not matter: we built it for fun and we are using it a lot!

GavinB• 14 years ago

Have you considered centering the text in the page? This looks good on a laptop sized screen, but on a widescreen monitor it feels very odd to be so far over with half the screen white.

There's nothing wrong with it this way, it just feels slightly off because it's different from most blogging platforms and news sites.

Otherwise, love the simple design and philosophy.

sfard13• 14 years ago

You know, I tried centering it and it looked "off" to me. Just my eye, though. I'd be curious if others feel the same. Anyone else's thoughts?

kidmenot• 14 years ago

Clean and simple. I really like it. Thank you, man.

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

Nice and simple is back in the business, however, this service could leverage more useful activity if you'd allow it to extend the twitter, i.e, something like tweet-longer type of service. Too often people have more than 140 character to say and something less than a paragraph or a blog post.

sfard13• 14 years ago

What do you mean by extend the twitter? As in post the first part of the article on their behalf?

I was thinking of something like that, but wanted to make the use case as general as possible so people can decide how they want to use it. Maybe I'm wrong :S

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

Well, yes. The thing is, it is practically impossible to trust a stranger service for writing/jotting-down thoughts on a service like this. It is simply hard to build and depend on it (you gave an example of Posterous - it was something I stopped trusting within few months).

I don't know about the technical solutions, but the way Branch currently integrates with Twitter, the way you can be conversing on Branch and still your conversation spills over Twitter...is what I have in mind in terms of this type of simple blogging service. The paragraph or couple of sentences should spill over to Twitter, and/or the Tweets should spill over to this type of service. All this not necessarily in a way it is currently setup by other platforms (like Wordpress, you can cross-post blogs to Twitter) but something naturally with least effort and distraction.

Am I making sense? There may be some services out there providing this experience, but ... anyways.

astrojams2• 14 years ago

Twitter auth didn't work for me.

sfard13• 14 years ago

Damn! Thanks for letting me know. Can you tell me what, if anything, it says?

astrojams2• 14 years ago

Redirected to an internal page: 127.0.0.1:8000

vacipr• 14 years ago

I love this.Is there any place we can report bugs or suggest new stuff ?

Also I can't login with twitter atm.Anyone else having this problem ?

sfard13• 14 years ago

Sorry, I forgot to change a variable in my settings file, so Twitter was calling back to my local machine. Hence it worked for me but no one else. Fixed now.

As for bugs, for now you can email me... saeidm[at]gmail.com or @sfard on twitter.

Much appreciated!

laacz2• 14 years ago

That's interesting. There is a trend with this kind of sites (I've seen at least one here on HN before). Is it some evolution of joint anonymous blogging/microblogging/pastebins? Or is it driven by an experience - I want to try blogging, let's start by writing, not registering, configuring, skinning, etc?

I don't believe that this might catch on, but as a branch of online self-publishing it could still live a little.

sfard13• 14 years ago

I think the trend you describe could be put in terms of disintermediation of web properties. Facebook, for instance, tries to be a platform that does everything. But much like real life, products are beginning to specialize because niche products can just do a better job at meeting the needs of a segment. That's why I disagree with you that this is just a trend.

laacz2• 14 years ago

Point taken. I would still argue that most people would not go to bare post composer to write. Personal blogs and websites fill this space. Of course, there are lots of those, who like minimalistic and distracion free environments.

Show HN: A Really Simple Blog Platform

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