Pagecord: Publish your writing effortlessly from your inbox | Hacker News Reader

Pagecord: Publish your writing effortlessly from your inbox

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23 pointsKerrick13 comments

Very clear pitch at https://pagecord.com. The video explains it all in a few seconds. Clear distinction from being yet another minimalist blogigng platform or static site.

Thanks. I'm not the best at copy so any feedback welcomed!

This is cool for sure, but I fail to see the audience. Microblogging may work well enough, but for anything more substantial you will likely still need to make edits within their app down the line — even immediately after posting when your markup is inevitably rendered differently than you expected.

E-mail has an "open protocol / data ownership" appeal to it as well, but that's kind of a facade in this case; you just get to store a log of your API calls, essentially.

Hi, author here :) You can just log in to make edits – there's a rich text editor. It's a good point about markup being rendered differently to what you might expect, it can happen, especially with images but you get to know what works pretty quickly. And you can log in and edit if it's not quite right. Regarding the audience, another good point – it's niche and I did mainly build it just for myself, but it's getting a bit of traction.

I had totally forgotten that Blogger has a post by email feature like this using (username.[secretword]@blogger.com)

What could go wrong?

I wonder how many people use blogger as their first foray into blogging these days?

Looks great. I am missing an index of existing posts, either on a separate index page or in a sidebar.

This is a good point. Right now it's just a scrollable page (like Twitter or whatever) but I'm thinking about adding an "Archive" page that breaks it down by date. I'm actually considering adding "Pages" support too, but first I'm about to launch email subscriptions :)

Excuse me, but speaking as a WriteFreely supporter I don't understand which features it supports that WriteFreely doesn't, why it wouldn't support some, or how it could be better organized or governed (in terms of monetization, relationship to the community, etc.) than my blogging platform of choice (respectively my own idea of the technical, cultural, and institutional layers of free software development).

I'm not saying this to dismiss this new blogging solution, I don't know the answers yet.

I mean to say however that in order not to EEE WriteFreely or get its own revenue drained by the WriteFreely niche, it would need (at first glance) to reach new niches, to provide a different (or more specific) features set, and/or to provide different workflows, that could be tailored for more specific target audiences.

As a reminder, WriteFreely supports both email publishing, a Ghost integration, and a publishing API that's already integrated into several IDEs like Emacs, which is what I'm using as a daily driver, so I wonder how not supporting them could improve the UX. (I'm sure it could, I just wonder how and I'd be delighted to see improvements in the minimal blogging landscape.) Similarly, Mataora provides an API with a necessity-made-virtue focus on minimalism.

I'm a big fan of Write Freely. I love what Matt is doing for the open web. I can't see Pagecord competing with it any time soon, but who knows.

I built Pagecord as a side project using Ruby for myself, and as an alternative to HEY World for people who don't use HEY. I wanted to include features I missed in HEY World such as media embeds and custom domains. As I got customers, I decided to open source it as a way of better guaranteeing longevity of the platform should I fall under a bus.

The goal of it is really to offer a way to (micro)blog as effortlessly as possible, as well as allowing people to _follow_ a Pagecord blog as simply as possible. I'm just about to launch email subscriptions for that (it's in beta), and all blogs supports RSS of course. Off the back of this I actually built an RSS reader to try and make it easier for people to get started with RSS too :) https://feedgrab.net

Posterous is back! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterous

Yes! I didn't actually know about Posterous when I built it... the angle was more "HEY World for people who don't use HEY". https://pagecord.com/pagecord-vs-hey-world

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