Aesop: A WordPress Storytelling Engine | Hacker News Reader

Aesop: A WordPress Storytelling Engine

aesop.crowdhoster.com

57 pointsajaymehta24 comments

After seeing New York's "Snow Fall"[1], Exposure[2] and being inspired by Medium's focus on typography, and content, I wanted to do something simpler for Wordpress. However, I realized I have to removed lots of features so it can be used by most people and be able to switch to other themes - I don't want to hold them with plugins, and custom hooks to their contents that they're stuck with my theme. Nonetheless, the power of Wordpress also gives you lots of freedom to do interesting stuffs, specially the newly introduced (since Wordpress 3.6) post formats[3].

So, I have partnered with another great designer, was once an intern with iA[4], and we have released our first iteration of a Typographically tailored theme for Wordpress - clean designs, minimal gears, wholesome focus on the content and big photos - Acorn Wordpress Theme[5].

Our idea is to keep making it better, enhancing it without adding anything additional than the theme itself, no plugins required to work nor custom fields. When the user wants a new theme, their content should continue to just work.

P.S. I never liked parallax scrolling unless that makes sense for the content in display. It reminds me of Skip Intro.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ 2. https://exposure.so/ 3. http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Formats 4. http://ia.net/ 5. http://demo-wp.theme6.com/acorn/

This looks to have been heavily inspired by Medium and their ilk (who were in turn no doubt inspired by the simplicity of the SVBTLE network).

If anything, it confirms the importance of the hard work that the Medium team have been doing w/r/t online article UX, and it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Yep you're actually spot on. I wanted to combine the interactive aspects of sites like Medium, Svbtle, Narrative.ly, exposure, and others, while leveraging an already existing and matured CMS, WordPress.

The WordPress theme itself handles the styling of the components. This way theme authors can design with little to no restrictions.

Lots of room for growth, improvement, and iterations.

I don't really think that's what it's modeled on. More likely it's a descendant of the New York Times format for multimodal stories à la "Snow Fall": http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/

This looks like a great way to create these "scrolling experiences," but I've always found them highly distracting. I'm constantly scrolling to get the paragraph I'm reading in the "sweet spot" about 3/4 of the way up the monitor, and it bothers me when pictures are half-revealed by some scripting trickery. To me the constant "interaction" is more like a constant reminder that you are navigating a story on the Internet. Personally I like it when the page stands still and I read it from the top left to the bottom right, like a book page, then can click somewhere or hit a key and have it advance. I'm working on making my own thing like that based on the three-column journals of the 19th century, but all I have so far is some static html :(.

That said, this looks really useful for making that type of story/experience and I hope it's adopted and used tastefully.

Serious question: What is the benefit of having big pictures stack instead of scroll? The Aesop video has big images that dont move, but get covered up by text as you scroll. I've seen this in other websites. What is the advantage? I find it makes me lose my place on a page, but that's just me. Wondering if there's any usability research behind the stacked images effect.

Heads up that http://aesopstories.com is a bit mangled on the latest version of desktop Safari. I do like the concept, but I was trying to figure out if there's a way to host all of the javascript and assets on my own infrastructure after the story is created.

You can use the (open-sourced) plugin with your own self-hosted Wordpress: https://github.com/bearded-avenger/aesop-core

thanks for the heads up. fixed.

Uh. If this is your homepage http://aesopstories.com/ it looks cheap. At the very list you should leave some blank space on the sides. On my screen (in Chrome) the text is almost cut from the browser.

Its a post beautifier. - not sure where the storytelling engine aspect of it comes in to play.

It gives you an interface that allows you to add components that facilitate building a story. If you want to add a time line, a little bio from a person in the story, artwork, you want to break up the text into sections, the components are there to do that.

I agree. Calling it a storytelling system makes me think of fan fiction or something like that.

I'm not sure how to best describe this, but I don't think "story telling" is the best possible way.

How does this differ from Ghost?

https://ghost.org/

In many ways. This is a wordpress theme set essentially, designed for people writing narratives to easily include media in an immersive and striking way, but with little to configure. Ghost is a paid blogging platform with an emphasis on having little in the way of backend or plugins.

This is been advertised as a hosting service, not something you can download and install on your own server/hosting company.

Granted, the main difference is that Ghost is Ghost (based on Node.js, etc), while this is WordPress (PHP based), with a custom theme (perhaps custom plugins, etc.).

I like it, but the fact that is hosted only makes it uninteresting for me.

The toolset is free and open source, you can attach it to any wordpress install.

https://github.com/bearded-avenger/aesop-core

This literally looks like a Medium.com theme for Wordpress, and if I'm not mistaken there's a lot here that a solid frontend developer could do in their sleep. Many have done more spec work and not asked for crowdfunded money to produce it.

And if I WERE asking for money, I'd definitely make sure my project homepage worked in Safari.

So you're bitter about something.

For what it's worth, I like the crowdfunded route here. Lot's of people using WP would like a way to craft beautiful long form stories. I have a hunch that people will be able to install this from WP's free plugin repo (its already on github), that's a tremendous gift there for a lot of people.

It would not be hard to point out dozens of themes that existed before Medium.com launched that had a similar aesthetic, so I'm not even sure why you are even bringing them up in such a snarky way.

They might be able to do it in their sleep, but they'd probably have to be awake to hook it into a CMS and make it work reliably with many different elements and ordering.

Thanks for the heads up with the site not working in Safari. Pesky undefined less var went undetected by both grunt and codekit. Fixed. Thanks again.

Video narration goês too fast to follow for some people like me

Your terms of service links to a 404

no. just stop.

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