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TigYog

tigyog.app

193 pointsibobev37 comments

I absolutely love this.

I wrote a “book” (really a 30,000ish word tutorial) on Rails development earlier this year and I hated the idea of publishing it as a static PDF so I built a web app just to host the book’s content and change log, along with validating license keys/authenticating users.

I’ve never found video courses to be useful for me - I do much, much better with written word that I can move through at a comfortable pace. I’m glad to see tools coming to make text-based courses easier to build

Will give this a try and see how my book content translates over.

I created Upload Academy for this reason. We're still building the platform and our first course is nearly complete: https://cloudopslevelone.upload.academy (currently freely available.) Our focus is helping people break into IT with a highly focused roadmap and course materials designed specifically for the goal.

I've never understood the obsession with video libraries with 50,000,000 hours of video content.

Thank you! Email me if you run into any problems or want any advice/review - I'm here to help :) - Jim, jameshfisher@gmail.com

Hey this is really cool - one suggestion - I had a lot of trouble watching the example video I think due to the microphone you've used. I had to close it because i couldn't stand the sound of the saliva in your mouth haha. So perhaps edit the audio, i'm sure there's a way to filter out those sounds.

Oh hi, creator here! "Make good demo video" is near the top of my list. I was gonna do it before posting TigYog to HN, but apparently someone wanted to post it before me!

TigYog is currently just me living on a shoestring! You can use code "HN" to get either of the featured courses half-price - it would help support me building this thing. Or you could support me by writing a course of your own - and I'm always happy to help you with that :)

- Jim

Hi Jim, maybe you should ditch the intro video, and create an intro tigyog instead, it's your chance to show people why what you're doing is better than video

I second this. Show and don't tell.

To offer another opinion, I'd prefer the video, since it's more familiar to me. And I can try going through a story myself later, anyway.

I think `transform: rotate()` is a little over done on that landing page.

Very nicely done! Although it is a bit short on features (the only interaction is to reveal something after a button press?). I like the way this is monetized, but is it also possible to export a course (as an author)? If not, I would probably not invest the time to create a course there.

If you are interested in creating interactive courses, you should probably know https://idyll-lang.org/docs - but it is more complicated and not as nice out of the box as TigYog.

Thanks! I believe you can get a very long way with only multiple-choice buttons. An excellent example of this is Brilliant.org. But I'll soon release an "iframe" feature that lets you make your own custom interactions. The iframe is seamless, and can tell TigYog when the user has completed the block, and with which answer.

You own all your content on TigYog. There's no export feature (although you can see the raw content of a page if you replace "/edit" with "/debug"), but it's on my list, and I'd help you export your stuff if you wanted to move the course.

I'd actually never come across Idyll! I'll play around with it and see what inspiration I can take :)

Is there any courses that are free to try as a demo instead of the video ?

Personally I'm a "learn by doing" person so demo videos are just too slow.

It's quite ironic too, for a site that advocates prose over video.

The demo video has a slightly annoying audio and suffers from very mellow tone that just doesn't communicate 'adventure'!

Aside from personal annoyance, I believe there's something very special and interesting about this app. Notion popularized 'block' model, now copied by everyone but the response tree logic takes it to another level.

I think interactive course creation sales pitch is blocking (pun intended) the concept from flourishing. I saw it as a way to create interactive journeys, games, puzzles, stories and even IT or support troubleshooting pages.

I've been marketing TigYog as a "course platform" because it's a concrete market where I think TigYog can be quickly profitable. But I agree the format is general. Let me know if there are features/assumptions in the TigYog product that stop you using it for other things, and I'll try to help out!

(p.s. agreed on video - it'll be redone soon!)

James! This is great work! I would love to see where this goes! Please consider adding support for terminal emulators!! It would make a killing and potentially give Codecademy a run for its money!

Thanks! I'm adding a "custom iframe" feature over the next week or so. This lets anyone build any kind of interactive block, such as terminal emulators, code editors/runners, etc. Stay tuned; email me if you want me to let you know when it's out! - Jim

Sorry for what's probably a stupid question: I see there's 2 featured courses on the home page, how do I view other courses? I don't see a search bar anywhere.

Not a stupid question! Google site:tigyog.app is your best shot right now. In the meantime, have a course on French grammar by my wife: https://tigyog.app/d/C-TK1S4pd2rm/r/learn-french-grammar-wit...

I think Lex Fridman and Balaji Srinivasan discuss the need to this, generally, on their new podcast episode together

Ah, I really like this. The multiple conversational options seem like a great way to allow people to specify if they want extra explanation, or they “get it” and want to move on, which things like YT videos and regular textbooks can’t support, if I’m understanding the concept right

I would love to see a collaborative variation of this where you could share your response to a prompt and then see what others have said and react. I'd use this for employee onboarding. Know anything like this out there?

Do you mean like - after you click on a button in a prompt, you would get to see what all other readers' answers were? Would that look like "10% of readers answered Yes; 90% answered No"? E.g. like a Twitter poll? If so - TigYog almost has this feature; it's just that it's only visible to the course creator as analytics. I could make the answer stats visible to readers too ...

I agree that would be insightful. Many times when taking interactive tests I wonder "Is it just me, or was that not the obvious answer?"

It's a "nice to have", obviously most people have gone through life without the luxury of knowing what fellow classmates answers were.

Yes, but also qualitative answers. Like "What do you want to change in your life after reading this? " and the you could see responses from others

Thank your for the response!

Wow. Yes, the style decisions on that page should be dialed back but otherwise you've got me super intrigued to try this over Notion, and I love the pricing model.

I’m getting this error when I visit this site:

> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

I’m on a phone browser (Firefox Focus).

Thanks for the report! I can't reproduce this though. I just installed Firefox Focus on Android, and enabled all the "blockers" except JS, but I don't get the error.

I'd really appreciate if you could copy-paste the error from the browser console!

What is the idea behind the name, is there any context or meaning? To me it sounds and looks similar to TikTok, was that the intent?

My mother says "tigyog" is what I called "yogurt" when I was a kid. I chose the stupidest possible name for my side-project. That side-project is now my full-time work. You can decide what the lesson is here.

the page flashed an apparent hint of actual content before vanishing and going:

  Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

the error in question suggests that there are no safeguards in place for the Web Audio API™ being disabled

Thanks for the report! What was your browser + OS? And yeah, I'm using `new AudioContext()` with no check that it's available. I'll fix that.

contemporary firefox with several APIs intentionally disabled for fingerprinting/annoyance prevention. it would likely be worth throwing up a specific error box stating “TigYog requires the [...] APIs to function. Please update/enable etc etc”

Hi James, this looks great. The blocks remind me of Notion (in a good way) and I'm excited to write some tutorials.

One nitpick: I started test driving writing a new course and the template is, I believe ironically about homeopathy, but as someone whose close family has gotten inextricably entwined in "alternative" medicines, I would appreciate a more standard lorem ipsum or a "how to tie your shoelaces" template instead. I think this aversion would apply for a lot more folks, too.

Thank you! Yes I've shamelessly ripped off Notion in many ways :)

My family are also into every kind of quackery [1], which is one reason I felt comfortable taking the piss out of homeopathy. Maybe I'll change it to a course on flat earth instead.

[1]: https://jameshfisher.com/2019/01/20/my-parents-are-flat-eart...

Is there A demo course to view? To see how it works?

This is super cool! :D

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