Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook | Hacker News Reader

Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook

paperwebsite.com

271 pointsazhenley70 comments

Hey! I'm the creator of Paper Website. This is the seventh tiny project I've built over the past 18 months - I've been documenting the whole process on my blog: https://tinyprojects.dev

I built Paper Website because I wanted a quick and easy way to start a daily blog. I get distracted when I write on my laptop, but I love writing using pen and paper - so I set out to build this.

I'm obviously very biased, but there's something about writing blog posts using pen and paper that is extremely fun and liberating. It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts onto the internet straight from my pen - it reminds me of all the unfocused blogs of the good old days.

I'm also weirdly very consistent at writing now - I've been posting for 40 days straight using this method (here's my daily blog: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev). It's not for everyone, but I love it.

Thanks for submitting this - if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them!

I have to ask. How do you manage your time with this many projects under your belt? I have a number of side projects and it's always tough balancing fixing bugs, adding new features to existing projects, or creating new projects.

Part of the fun with building tiny projects like this is they're really low stakes. I build them as an mvp in a matter of weeks/months, launch them fast, then get a feel for if I enjoy running them. If I don't, I axe them, or end up selling them - (which is also a fun process).

This means I only really have a couple of things on the go at once, but I can try out way more ideas in a short period of time.

I'm a messy writer. Just out of curiosity how does it handle this. If I scribble out text or turn it into a rectangle does it skip the text while scanning it? Does it support text that is deliberately struck through?

Neat project by the way!

It's using a combination of OCR and GPT-3. GPT-3 is basically being used as a glorified grammar corrector, trained on bad OCR sentences and their correct equivalents. If there's spelling mistakes, crossing outs, or bad OCR going on, GPT-3 will pick it up and correct it into a coherent sentence. There's also a web-based editor that you can go into and edit everything afterwards.

Love your stuff, I have been anticipating an update from you! I was wondering, how were you able to get access to GPT-3? AFAIK it's in closed beta and hard to get access to. Thanks!

Thank you! I applied as soon as it was announced - I probably waited about 8 months before I eventually got access. Even after that, there's hoops you have to jump through before you can go live. It's incredibly cool tech to have on an API call.

Also is the gpt3 an important part of the cost? Gave you tried if e.g. gpt2 was enough for your use case?

Do you support Markdown? I don't see any evidence of that, but it would seem to be a perfect fit, allowing users to skip a lot of editing/refining on the website and stick exclusively to paper.

Not yet - but I'm working on a tagging/markdown system for the exact reasons you described.

I like the idea, it's cute and could be a whole new way for more physically minded people to get into publishing, but my qualms are: $8.25 seems a little steep for a simple blog. Perhaps if it was actually the price of a coffee ($3-5) it would be a bit more reasonable.

Second thing is there's no way to try it out. I don't really want to drop $99 on something without having any idea whether it's going to work for me, especially as handwriting recognition is so sketchy and I have no idea what it's going to be like.

Perhaps even just a demo mode or something to play around with?

Thanks so much for the feedback on this. There's a bit of a cost associated with paper to webpage conversions (and obviously hosting websites and images) - so I'm quite content with the current pricing.

You can try a Paper Website for 7 days for $1 here: https://paperwebsite.com/signup

> There's a bit of a cost associated with paper to webpage conversions (and obviously hosting websites and images)

Resources for OCR and hosting could be provided by the users themselves. You doing it for them could be the expensive option that justifies getting the credit card out :)

Remarkably good OCR is built into Apple imaging now, it’s hard for an iPhone user to not bring it.

Apple Notes of your note book, then Markdown “Exporter” app* into a static blog generator of choice does require that last thing, a statis blog generator, which may(?) be worth the $8/month of hassle alone.

* Exporter: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?mt=12

Lovely little app, lets Apple Notes be your blogging editor — support the dev!

> Perhaps if it was actually the price of a coffee ($3-5)

Anecdotal, but i've never seen a coffee that expensive. A coffee machine in France is usually < 1€ (more like 50c), and i've never paid more than 1.5€ for in an actual café.

Back on topic, i agree with the sentiment that this is the kind of tool you wouldn't use for business and therefore wouldn't get your credit card for immediately. A free-software, donation-based model may attract more people and make more money (and make grumpy librists like me happy).

Really cool stuff (on paper anyway)!

Looking through your blog, the sheer output you're able to accomplish as a 1-man show is staggering. I was reading through your MMO writeup and had to laugh at "Monday-Wednesday: Learn Unity". How do you keep yourself motivated enough to crank out a project in just two weeks?

Equally impressed. I feel like there’s a part of my brain when I try to learn some new tech that nags “are you sure this is this the best way to spend your time? There might be an alternative tech X that would be better to learn in the long run”.

It’s something I’m working on personally, but I suspect productive folks like OP have effectively silenced that for themselves :-)

I love the concept of this, although I can't see it working out for me personally, as I often find myself meticulously re-writing text, so I'm hesitant about hand-written text (maybe that's the difference I need...?).

Separate question - Is there a feed of any sort (e.g. RSS / Atom) on the website that's produced?

Cool project, kudos to the author! For those bashing it with "it is a simple OCR", which is somehow standard HN elitism I must say, a couple of things. First, it is a well-thought project: besides online blog hosting, you have a mobile app AND you get a free notebook. Also, great explanation videos.

Someone will say "meh" for this, but if you started and shipped the project (I doubt many of those haters did), these tiny things take ages to finish, especially if you rely on external partners like someone shipping a custom notebook. Not something you can code in your favorite editor.

Second thing: I lurk around fountain pen and notebook/journal communities, where people handwrite a lot. These people spend a lot of money on fine instruments (Pilot Custom 823 ~ $300, Namiki Maki-e ~ $1000) and excellent paper (e.g. Clairefontaine), so they prefer a pleasant and well-around experience rather than something cheap. I see projects like paperwrite.com can bring a lot for them because they can easily "capture" parts from their journal, and suddenly they have a blog post. This community isn't big (however, I noticed a little bit raising trend with going analog and offline), but you will have most of them as long-time customers if something is well done.

A couple of suggestions for the author: 1) Support for italics and other handwriting styles. It is a challenging problem. 2) Support for other languages (even harder). 3) Markdown syntax straight from the notebook would be very cool.

This is pretty neat. The generated blogs are minimalist (in the good sense); They're easy to look at and read. The HTML it generates is not bad either.

If I had a concern it would be this part:

  Although it's very good, there can be instances where it makes mistakes. If you find that your handwriting is often being picked up incorrectly, here are some tips to reduce errors:

  * Make sure you are using a high quality camera to capture an image of your page. You can upload files of up to 5mb.
  * Try to make your handwriting as large and neat as you can.
  * Keep line spacing consistent throughout your writing. It can help to use a ruled notebook.
  * Ensure each line starts from the same left-hand position of your page.

I think this kind of product being successful relies too heavily on It Just Works for it to have these caveats. Personally, I can't write like above; My writing is all over the place.

Also this from the app description:

  NOTE: You must have a Paper Website account before using this app.

I feel like you should be able to do everything from the app. Install it, create an account, choose your domain name, and start posting.

Still, cool product, I hope it goes well. I'm sure there are people out there that this would remove a major hurdle for.

And well done for building something from scratch by yourself!

> I feel like you should be able to do everything from the app. Install it, create an account, choose your domain name, and start posting.

They would have to pay Apple 30% of the subscriptions.

15% until they’re making more than $1m/year.

Stripe is under 3%, and at scale the prices go down rather than up.

For small amounts, Stripe is expensive (2.9% + 30 cents)

$10: 5.9%

$5: 8.9%

$3: 12.9%

If you combine it with Stripe Billing, add another 0.5%.

Actually 30% for the first year of a subcription and 15% for any subsequent years of that subscription when it comes to auto-renewing subscriptions.

Neat, although I was hoping the "paper" aspect of it would be emphasized more in some way, especially for the reader. This is essentially a hosted blog, and every OS/platform/keyboard app already supports OCR.

> Start for the price of a coffee ($8.25/mo)

It's funny watching the inflation in the price of a cup of coffee in tech marketing vs the real world.

This must be a starbucks "coffee" for that price.

A Starbucks coffee is like $5 Canadian and I find even that to be ridiculous.

The largest size of the fanciest coffee you can get (mocha chocolate frappucino whatever) is still like $5.50 in the middle of San Francisco, and I'm sure cheaper elsewhere. A regular Starbucks roast is 2 bucks, actually on the cheaper side compared to other coffee shops.

Don’t forget the $1 surcharge for the lactose-intolerant!

With coffee, non-milk substitute, and tax, a latte can run me nearly $8 :(

I was seriously frightened that coffee now costs almost $10 a cup and I hadn’t realized it.

I think it's $8.25 for the giant coffees tinyprojects must drink to launch so many products :)

To be fair, $8.25 is a weird price to draw an analogy with -- a deli sandwich (with no side)? A six-pack of Bud Light?

I’m actually in the process of implementing a new website for myself that’s basically a notebook as written, so that you’ll see handwriting, rather than it being converted to text (though I will provide plain text alternatives for accessibility purposes). My theory is that this will help me to keep things shorter (brevity is a virtue), and integrate illustrations and diagrams far more prominently, as well as just being different and experimenting in an interesting direction. Still not certain it’ll pan out, but I’m hopeful.

I’m using my reMarkable tablet. I’m hopeful that the PineNote will come along nicely to the point where I can make dedicated software that works better for my purposes, things like managing metadata, colour and hyperlinks as part of the document, rather than as independent post-processing; and one other long-term goal I have is segmentation of prose into lines and words (despite occasional overlapping ascenders and descenders) to allow text selection and reflowing for diverse screen sizes, rather than just having the entire thing be a static image.

Thank you for taking accessibility into consideration!

If you like the idea of writing on paper and then doing digital things with it, I have been really pleased with the RocketBook line of reusable notebooks. They don't do the automatic blog hosting like this, but there's also no recurring fee. Just a simple notebook, a simple phone app, and files that show up in my Google Drive (or DropBox or email or wherever).

(No relation beyond happy repeat customer)

Since OCR is hit or miss, I can't see many users signing up without trial/preview of how well the OCR works on your handwriting.

Also would suggest being able to e-mail a photo and having the service reply with a temporary URL of how the site would look.

How much of the AI is really automated, NLP AI and how much of it is human-augmented Amazon Mechanical Turk-level Human as an AI (Augmented Intelligence or Pseudo-AI)?

it's funny that this is downvoted when this has been exactly the way that many Silicon Valley tech companies have run their services behind the scenes

The dirty little secret that most don't even realize. Hey that's why data labeling / data annotation / human moderation companies like Scale, Labelbox, Hive, and others have been raising millions of dollars to fund their little worker armies.

Someone else made a similar comment, neither of us got answers even tho the creator is commenting here on other posts, so I suspect it's a lot less automatic / automated / "AI" NLP than the site might imply.

Isn't basic latin OCR a solved problem? I wouldn't expect to have to pay a human to be able to provide it.

You'd be surprised. What if I told you Expensify uses humans to do OCR on paper receipts? You'd think computer-generated English fonts on white paper with mostly numbers would be easy for OCR. Think again. What good is a 98-99% accuracy rate when the OCR mistakes $80 for $08. It's humans in the loop. Much more than you might expect.

In such setting I would expect OCR to have higher accuracy than humans.

Apparently I would be wrong.

> Only 100 available. Get yours before its gone.

That’s unexpected. Is there any context?

Edit: looks like this is for a discounted $8.25/month plan; the regular plan is $10/month.

Hmm, it's an interesting idea. I feel like the finished websites are sort of bland though. I wonder if leaning into a more messy / paperlike aesthetic would make the product feel more fun, since to me I feel like wanting to make a website from paper (rather than, say, googledocwebsite.com) is a choice someone would make if they really love paper and notebooks and that sort of aesthetic.

I wonder if it could be possible to preserve the picture of the paper, with the OCR'd text selectable and positioned on the paper, à la PDF.

I'm not trying to complain about how the website is implemented, but, all I get is a blank gray screen no matter how many JS domains I whitelist. The only functional bit is the 3rd party 'crisp' chat thing in the lower right.

I think for most people the best option is running a static webserver, forwarding the port, and then copying .html and media files into folders in ~/www/ (or whatever).

This is just an off-the-cuff guess, but I wonder if you're ironically not blocking enough Javascript?

The page loads for me as long as I allow 1st party scripts. I don't have XHR turned on for the site. Iframes obviously don't work, but everything else seems functional: navigation, controls. I don't see a chat option anywhere, I guess I'm blocking that.

Just purely a guess, may not be the real issue, and you may already be doing that anyway. But I've run into websites where it feels like half of their JS exists to break the other half, and when I reduce down to only 1st-party, everything suddenly starts working better.

The video autoplayed for me, with sound.

I'm sure the website is good, but that is super obnoxious to me.

Edit: using a phone, so maybe it was a button press that activated sound.

I thought all browsers blocked that stuff nowadays. Which browser are you using?

On my phone it autoplayed, but muted.

Firefox on Android.

I've been using https://mmm.page to build small sketch-like websites really fast. For example, I used it for a small performance festival in May. Every day I would make photos, videos, and then upload it on the website. I wouldn’t be able to produce a site of different design each day by coding manually or with any other service that I know, there just wouldn't be time left for that:

https://mmm.page/offtrack

https://mmm.page/offtrack.two

https://mmm.page/offtrack.three

Paper Website looks fun because I would be crafting the website by hand. I have the feeling, however, that something is lost when a very minimalist blog is created as a result. A minimalist blog could be built with any kind of software. A paper notebook offers much more freedom - in sketching, in using colors, in relating ideas to each other, in writing big and small, in integrating text in sketches. Can't there be a way of preserving the dirtiness, the sketch character of a notebook, while still recognizing text as text?

I also suspect that in using it, I will start writing _for the machine_ in the notebook, instead of _for me_. In the sense of writing carefully, with clean lines and big letters, in order to make it easier for the machine to do its work. This change in how my writing flows could also change how the content of my writing flows. Similar to how I am speaking differently to Siri and other voice assistants than I am to humans: more attentive to pronunciation and trying to be precise in formulations. There is very little poetry in speaking to voice assistants. Could the same happen when writing for OCR?

I want to like ideas like this but it's been done before and rarely gains traction for most users.

We've seen this with smart notebooks that let you write with either a smart pen or a smart pad and immediately digitize and OCR. We also already have most of this today on our phones via built-in text scanning with OCR and the ability to easily copy and paste into any blogging application of your choosing.

I don't know if there's really enough efficiencies to be gained here, especially any that overcome the lock in required to use this product.

I love this idea. Could open up blogging to whole new audience s

I'm not trying to shallowly dismiss this, but it's frankly pretty shallow. It's just OCR as a service: blog posts, but you don't have to type, and you have to write really carefully so it doesn't accidentally make you look illiterate. I believe that even the people to whom this appeals will quickly become disenchanted.

That was my feeling too. Calling it “magic” might be stretching things just a bit.

Apple calls a mouse that you can't use while charging "magic", I don't see why this can't be described as such.

Apple has shown us that a little integration and UX consideration goes a long way. Just because you could put together two existing technologies doesn't mean you did, or would, and it especially doesn't mean that a nontechnical person could or would.

If I liked writing things by hand in notebooks (I don't), then I'd definitely be interested in the integration here.

I agree with what you've said about integrating technologies and improving the user experience. I'd agree with what you say about this particular instance if it were a) more seamless, and b) more reliable. The flow of writing, photographing, adding headers, adding images, styling: I don't think that's been well thought-through as a user experience. And the requirements for writing so as to ensure a clean result from OCR: get good, heavyweight paper, write large and neat, make sure all the lines line up on the left — it doesn't sound like an experience of "Just write!" Gotta have a good camera too, which a lot of people who prefer to avoid typing may not be inclined to value.

Tangentially related but I always appreciated Jeff Bridges hand-written website

https://jeffbridges.com/latest

Only posting because there’s a few suggestions about hand-written styling on a web page.

is this one of those faux-AI mechanical turk services? as in: 'getting underpaid workers in the global south to transcribe your stuff while making it look like a magical algorithm'?

Can it correctly recognize cursive handwriting? I haven't printed anything (except for my name below my signature) in the last 40 years and printing would slow me down immensely.

Random idea. How about leaving a bit of designated space on the bottom of the paper page for check-boxes or tags etc to guide the app with the processing.

Hey! how many website can i create if i subscribe this service? only 1 website for $8? or can i make several blogs via this service?

Lovely idea but the pricing is extreme for a small project like this. I am sing rocketbook nearly does the same thing for free.

A great project! Congratulations on the launch! Are we able to create some kind of animations in the future?

congrats on your launch!

Warning: autoplay video

why?

a legit question. There's a lot of how but not a lot of why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com