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?
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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/
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.
[+] [-] kbd|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lelandbatey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|12 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] wyck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devcpp|12 years ago|reply
Then again, I suppose I'm not part of the intended audience.
[+] [-] dshanahan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokull|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|12 years ago|reply
Financially identical deals can have wildly different uptakes.
You get better results from "Cash discount!" than from "Credit card surcharge", for example.
[+] [-] nathas|12 years ago|reply
Paying sign ups also increased, but not quite as much.
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lowmagnet|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oellegaard|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tech-no-logical|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nilliams|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tericho|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarou|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otterley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcnmrn|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] nigekelly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrojams|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] YorickPeterse|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SnootyMonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidcollantes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsowers|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swanson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IsraGS|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egonschiele|12 years ago|reply
> Full ownership of your brand and data.
This is the only thing not provided by anyone else afaik.
[+] [-] awsm|12 years ago|reply