Silvrback is now open to everyone – high-quality, Markdown-powered blogging | Hacker News Reader

Silvrback is now open to everyone – high-quality, Markdown-powered blogging

dsowers.silvrback.com

91 pointsdsowers69 comments

Looks very nice. I'd actually consider using this.

Questions:

* I like that you support tags. How do you browse tags?

* Customizable URL slugs: so if I want to date my archive URLs I have to manually type in '/archive/2013/10/07/slug' each time? Is there any way to template the archive URLs?

* How does your archive page scale when you have thousands of posts? https://dsowers.silvrback.com/archive

* As others have mentioned, I'd really prefer a free trial than shell out money (I understand it's not much) and feel like I wasted it if I poke around for a few minutes and find it's not for me.

* I had a question about exporting data but someone already asked it :)

* "Your homepage... will show the latest three posts in full." Is this customizable? I often have a bunch of short posts that mostly serve to keep track of stuff I read and find it later. I'd rather show the last, say, week's worth of content instead of a fixed number of posts.

* Full text search?

I'm getting a lot of feature requests. So I have to pick and choose. You have some good questions.

The tags are there to give the reader extra meaning about the article. For example, you could tell someone to read an article first in the tag. However, I believe I will offer a way to filter by tags soon. This wasn't their primary purpose, though. They aren't like stack overflow tags. They are more like post-it-notes to guide your readers.

If you don't want to use the auto-generated friendly slug that Silvrback makes for your article, then you would have to edit it to your liking in "advanced post settings." I don't want this to be bloated with features so I don't have a 'slug template' save option. 98% of my users wouldn't need this option. Sorry :)

With thousands of posts the page will be paginated. I'm actually still implementing this. Should be ready soon.

If you do buy a subscription and don't like it, just email me and I will refund you.

I want to have my blog on a custom domain name... How do I set up my DNS to point at your system?

Just click on "custom domain" in settings and it has instructions for you. If you need extra help, just send me an email.

I'm still playing around with ideas for users to customize their homepage more. Might give the option to show fixed posts or custom date range.

Question - is there an export option included? A cursory glance around the pages doesn't turn anything up.

I've had to stage an emergency exodus of blog content from third party hosts more than once because reasons (most recently: Thanks OVH billing department!), so having content in a non-exportable site scares me a little, especially when I'll be using that site as my primary writing area.

The export option will be there in about 1 week. It's one of the top items on my todo list now. Data liberation is important.

Could you explain what happened with OVH? I currently have a couple of servers with them, and if there's something I should be wary of, I'd like to know.

For starters, their .com website is down (but not their UK one):

http://www.ovh.com/ http://www.ovh.co.uk/

I doubt this is something affecting a bunch of other people, but I lost a dedicated server there through a combination of my own ignorance, a dodgy spam filter, and their strange billing policies (instead of charging you month to month, they generate an invoice you have to log in to pay).

I hadn't touched this server in weeks, so they generated their invoice, the notification email got filed away as spam, and the server was disconnected (again the message being filed as spam).

It wasn't until almost a week after that I noticed something was up and called them. They advised me to open a ticket, I did, one day later the server disappeared from their control panel, and I have yet to receive a reply on that ticket.

The missing the billing and their messages getting spam filtered is completely on me, but the not answering a ticket and linking ticket-creating-account-ness the payment status of the server is totally on them.

Back to Hetzner, it seems. I didn't lose anything but my blog (which is Octopress and thankfully backed up to Bitbucket) and a couple of VMs I used for learning things.

Just to throw my 2 cents in, I recently switched from octopress to using silvrback at http://vivekgani.com - here's why:

- I work part-time as a contractor, and part-time on my side project. While I have a ton of blog design ideas, I lost a personal bet that I'd have them done by the end of September.

- I have had lots of posts backlogged over the past several months. I was starting to have a fear of posting due to the design of my older site.

- Octopress is wonderful, but to use it right you really need to be familiar with tagging your repos correctly / using a separate repo for your posts. I didn't want to think about all this in addition to all my usual pickiness about the front-end design.

- I really didn't want to fiddle with wordpress. This is a personal blog, not something I plan to delegate to other content writers.

- As glennf and others have mentioned, I didn't want to use medium, or any other free site. I want my own domain to be used, and occasionally look at google analytics.

So far, I'm happy with silvrback. Liking how it properly scales images when I use refer to them within a list, Markdown is the first class citizen, and psychologically I'm not thinking too hard about blog design for now. Yes, there's some UX annoyances with the initial release of silvrback, but I'm sure Damian's working on them.

Will I still be using it in couple years? Maybe not, but for a site that's only got a couple posts and already gotten a couple thousand visits and mentions from sites like hackaday & packlite.tumblr in the past week I'm happy enough with it.

Why would anyone choose a closed source blog platform in this day and age, this is a serious question I truly don't understand why.

It’s markdown so migrating is easy.

So this site disappears one day or is sold..markdown is irrelevant, since you do not control your data. There is plenty of markdown enabled open source blog software.

Fair point.

Absolutely, this is an actual dealbreaker. If I can't tweak my blog, I'm not doing one.

Then again, I suppose I'm not part of the intended audience.

Very much agree with this sentiment on principle. Alas, people seem to prefer avoiding any hassle and jumping on to closed platforms that make design and other bits simple. I'd imagine those that get traction eventually move towards a platform they fully control.

Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and offer a refund if they don't like it. I wonder if this strategy will net you more or less sales. My gut tells me that it will be less, because more people will be driven away by the fact that they can't even test it before paying, but who knows, really. Might be an interesting thing to A/B test and write about the results.

I was debating this as well. I'm not sure which method is the best, either. I was thinking that if it were free then I would just get a bunch of 'vanity metrics' rather than active users who are serious about writing stuff and using the platform.

Anecdotal, but we originally had that approach. We switched to a free trial model and our leads went up an order of magnitude.

Paying sign ups also increased, but not quite as much.

> Rather than offering a free trial, you make everything paid upfront and offer a refund if they don't like it.

Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.

You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card surcharge", for example.

Free trials are for the birds.

Particularly when software is work-related, the amount of time it takes to evaluate something is usually far more than the product costs. For instance, I'd expect to spend more than an hour writing and promoting my serious post, and if I valued my time at (a very low) $50 an hour, the time costs more than the product does.

(The perverse thing about enterprise software sales is that the same thing is true about $50,000 software purchases)

Anyhow, I can say that 95% of the time I sign up for a 30-day free trial, 30 days go by and I never get around to evaluating the product because time is more dear to me than money.

Already up and running on this. Thanks Damian!

I really like this layout compared to doing it myself with Octopress. It's much more convenient to have most of the decisions made for me because I tend to get into optimization paralysis.

Is a hosted blogging site the best way to "own your own brand"?

Maybe? I'm not sure the two are necessarily connected.

I'm using this phrase to contrast Silvrback with other content publishing sites such as Medium and Svbtle, which don't give you nearly as much freedom and ownership.

Yeah, since Medium and Svbtle seems to 'own' your content.

I'd like to have a favicon that's not a gorilla, but I used to have an O(ctopress) for my favicon. Not a big deal.

I understand your point and think it's not a bad line from a marketing standpoint, but the concept may not click with the intended audience.

Based on the app's features, I would say the audience is composed of tech-savvy developers / designers who want a lot of control over their content and want to establish their own brand.

I think many of those people will be inclined to blog on their own websites, where they can do all the hacking they want. Blogs are easy to establish, especially if you're shooting for a minimalistic feel.

Having said all this, I wonder if there's a way to make Silvrback available as a service that people can apply to their own sites? ...I'll admit that business isn't my strong suit, but I think this would be a great way to go if it can be made financially viable.

I'm a technological specialist. I can build you, but I am not that great at HTML 5, CSS, Graphic Design, etc.

I have a Wordpress blog right now that sucks, and frankly I'm terrified at the thought of making changes to it because Wordpress was never designed for maintainability. Hard-corded absolute URLs in the database are the kind of malpractice that is endemic in IT, and make it very hard for me to copy my blog to test.myblog.com, upgrade to a new version of Wordpress, then change my theme.

(For any system I develop for a customer, on my own account, having development, staging and production servers is an absolute requirement)

I'm afraid of FUBARing my old blog if I upgrade my Wordpress because Wordpress has pluginitis.

I suppose I could switch to some other blog software, but now there are so many options I could spend two months just screwing around with different blog packages.

What I really want is something that cuts through the complexity. I could hire a local webdev shop to do a blog or CMS customization for me around $3000, and expect to put hours into requirements work, or I could buy a product like this for $50 a year and figure that's worth one hour of my time spent reading documentation for yet another off-brand blog.

Can you really build me?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Build_You

I just signed up and migrated (manually, as there doesn't seem to be any way to import stuff) my blog from tumblr.

http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/ vs http://blog.kristian.io/

To be honest, I think it is a bit too minimal. With the tagline "own your brand", I find it strange that the site is completely white and generic - what exactly is my brand then? Not even my name or picture is in the header.

I was also hoping for the posibility to write a synopsis for each blog article, as I some very long and technical articles that I don't want to be displayed in its full length on the front page. This unfortunately isn't possible.

Furhtermore, I find the menu thing extremely strange. It took me a while to discover it and I don't think it's very user friendly.

I have to say that if the above things are not fixed, I don't think I would want to move my blog at all. Fortunately I signed up for the monthly plan.

Edit: Also, it would be cool to let me store the markdown documents in Dropbox, so I could use a proper editor (and also for import/export).

Hey oellagaard. When you say, "I was also hoping for the possibility to write a synopsis for each blog article", where would you want that synopsis to show up? In the archive? Just curious about this idea. (I'm taking feature requests). Sorry if you find it to be too minimal and don't like the menu. I guess everyone has different tastes. I like your idea about storing the docs in dropbox.

I'd love for it to show up on the home page. Since some of my blog posts get a bit long, it would be cool to write a small synopsis of each article to let me user scroll through a few articles on the home page, without reading through the entirety of all each blog post.

I think it would be really cool if you could use the header from the bio page, for the rest of the site as well - then I think it would be less anonymous, e.g.: http://kristianoellegaard.silvrback.com/bio

In the end the menu isn't a big problem - but I would really like the opportunity to put my name or a blog name on the top of the page.

You actually can do this: "I think it would be really cool if you could use the header from the bio page, for the rest of the site as well - then I think it would be less anonymous, e.g.:"

In "Settings," there is a field called "short bio sentence." This bio sentence will show up next to your name on every post.

I'm still playing around with different home page variations. I will consider your request (or give people more options for their homepage). I'll let you know.

I wasn't thinking about the short bio sentence, what I want on the top of the page is http://c.kristian.io/image/2b3X1P2y1Z3R ;)

I think it would be cool with a few variations or options.

I might be biased, but I think your new blog on silvrback looks way better than your old one. The presentation of your code is much more enjoyable to read, as well. Just my 2 cents.

Yet another blogging platform for which I need to use 'ctrl -', resulting in a content-width of less than 600 pixels, which looks ridiculous on a modern monitor.

I still don't get the 'large print' trend. Yes, I've read all the so-called 'pro's', but the content still looks ridiculously sparse to me.

As a beta customer I can tell you this (and the inability to custom style anything) is my biggest pet peeve. I can see like 12 lines of text above the fold on my 24" monitor.

Always surprised when I see comments like this. I have the opposite view. The font size of both the OP site (and Medium) is perfect for me and I wish more sites would depart from the web's 'tiny text' mistakes of the past.

I find a website with 'old-fashioned' 12px or lower text is like me holding my iPhone at arm's length. Don't get it.

Curious as to your monitor size/res and whether you use the computer leaning forwards/backwards. I'm a 28yr old with good eyesight, I lean back in my chair.

Also wonder if a lot of hackers are biased towards small text because they're used to their IDEs/terminals which default to pretty tiny fonts.

I'm not advocating the re-emergence of 12px text but the body text for Silvrback is 22px with 1.5 line-height. Medium is 1.45 and I believe 1.2 is normal. I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

>> I believe 1.2 is normal

It's the default in browsers and what the 'normal' keyword means yes, but I don't think it's a good default, any more than the default font-size is. I think 1.5 is a pretty common recommendation in the world of typography. I don't really have any good references to back that up, but if you Google '1.5 line height best practice' there's some reading to be had (realise that's a highly scientific approach)!

>> I feel like I'm reading a children's book with 2 sentences per page.

Is that a problem? Perhaps they got it right with children's books. :) Is it comfortable on your eyes?

I use a 24" 1920x1200 monitor, nothing special, and it's about 50cm from my eyes. I'm in my 40s, so anything real close (< 25cm) is hard to read without reading glasses, but otherwise my eyesight is fine.

Don't know about 'hacker bias', but yes, I'm a dev that's grown up on xterms (on huge monitors), and use IDE's fullscreen at fontsizes a lot smaller than those of a medium blog (now _that_ would be a waste of screen space ;))

I see your point, but imho font sizes like OPs feel like a large print edition book held about a foot in front of my face. I guess it's mostly a matter of taste.

This looks really nice. What are the advantages compared to some comparable blogging platforms out there? Couldn't I just use Octopress or Github Pages to achieve similar functionality?

If you'd like to get even more speed, ensure your assets are minified, compressed and cacheable, and served directly from the filesystem if possible. There aren't any Cache-Control: or Expires: headers for those. It took nearly 1.5 seconds to retrieve https://dsowers.silvrback.com/assets/application-cb034c94e2b..., and time to first byte was 634ms.

Silvrback is really nice and interesting. Why not reimagine publishing from the ground up using Markdown syntax?

This is what we're trying to do with http://markdawn.com/. The reason I'm leaving a comment here is that the app is not ready for a “Show HN” yet (or maybe it's just a designer/engineer complex for not doing that at this time).

Looks great. Need to check it out. Do you do all the rss and sitemap stuff too? Any features to help promote posts or drive SEO?

Thanks. Yeah, RSS is included. With regards to promotion, I tweet a bunch of good user posts and I'm also putting together a 'best of the week' posts page for content discovery.

For a simple review, I wrote up my initial experience with Silvrback, after migrating over a blog from WordPress.

http://jasonlotito.com/over-the-us

I should note that I've been very happy with Silvrback. It's easy to use, fast, and works as expected.

There's a

  Silvrback © 2013

at the bottom of the page of your post that I'm not should be there?

You have full ownership over your data. I didn't mean for that copyright to suggest anything else and I'm removing it asap.

I was curious about this too. It seems every Silvrback page has the logo smacked on it twice (at the footer as well as in the menu).

It looks good. How does it differ from Ghost?

Ghost requires installation and tinkering (plugins, themes, etc). Silvrback is designed to give you something that looks great and doesn't take up your time. I believe that people shouldn't spend any time building a personal blog. You should spend that time on your products instead.

I could be wrong, but I think Silvrback probably has much better syntax highlighting than Ghost (do they have it at all?) and it gives you a bio page so you can consolidate your brand.

Ghost is also open source, much like a lot of blog software. Syntax highlighting is mostly irrelevant due to most platforms using 3rd party bundles like prettify,Syntaxhighlighter, etc.

I'll take having an open source, easy to install, fully controllable platform over closed any day of the week, especially for something simple like a blog platform, and blogs are not about products unless that is what you consider yourself.

Is there a way to see the available colour schemes without having to pay any money? Having created a colour scheme that's also called "Autumn" I'm wondering if it in this case would be mine or somebody else's (probably the latter).

I'm also a very happy early Silvrback customer. It's fast, simple, attractive, and very easy to setup with your own domain: http://self-proficient.com/

Thanks. Glad you like it!

Everything is fast when you only have one post. :-)

I really like the look of the bio page - might have to redo my own blog template :)

I just opened an account and get really dissapointed when I found that your Logo (silvrback) it's all over my blog. We are already paying for your service, there is no need to put your logo all over OUR blog.

This looks really cool, so I'll sound like an ass for saying this, but: for $6.99 / month, what do I get over a free blogging solution?

> Full ownership of your brand and data.

This is the only thing not provided by anyone else afaik.

It looks interesting but if it can't be self hosted. I'm out.

That's a great logo.

Thanks.

Looks like a medium-svbtle hybrid. Nice effort.

Are there any customization/theme options? Or is every Silvrback blog going to look the exact same?

Is there anywhere I can actually try out the editor before signing up?

What do the Markdown people think of things like NML: (http://genius.cat-v.org/erik-naggum/xml-sgml-nml-lisp)? Isn't this a much nicer way of working with HTML (especially with macros)? The syntax described in the link is compact and elegant, whereas markdown is smallish but basically ad hoc.

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