write.as

This is a followup to <https://write.as/vxvi0arfwzx5c.md>. What follows are a list of projects varying in size and scope, and varying from fairly abstract to concrete, and general thoughts about the Write.as experience and business direction. I'm approaching this from a position that anything here, or even elsewhere can be *picked*. (See "delegate".) That is, the order comes to "work on \<this\>", and then I do so, understanding and expecting that I should see it through with minimal "supervision" -- that there is no real budget for dialog here or extended riffing about the right approach to take. (This necessarily rules out a lot of the abstract stuff. I've left it in mostly for completeness.) - A plan that ensures all your outgoing links and embedded media are archived with archive.org - a billing option that lets people "tip" archive.org in December - Side note: what guarantees are provided for paid account right now? I.e. what happens when they stop paying? Need a position piece on the Web and the integrity of Write.as URLs? - Marketing and product strategy: Write.as as your *home*. A writer's tool that you live inside. Building off "Creating an author blog on Write.as". E.g., you might be "on Substack" *right now* (the way you had a MySpace in 2005), or a journo writing under some pub's masthead, but will you be there in 5 years (and/or will Substack be there)? The idea is that Write.as is for *you* -- forever. Not just the place to start your work, but the place to store and keep track of it, even as you pick up and discard platforms, and while progressing through your career with different organizations [XXX side benefit: capturing attention from people thinking about taking the plunge on Substack -- have an account on both; use Write.as to compose a piece and publish to your readers through Substack if you want, but keep track of it for life under your Write.as account, which is for you, the writer] - Need to explicitly *tell* people that this is Write.as's strategy - Not all written pieces are public - use case: you write for pub X and Y, and X's articles are free to view, but Y's are by subscription only (or the editors don't want you syndicating it elsewhere); you should be able to configure per-org settings so that all pieces for pub Y are only available in your personal, logged in view by default, without having to manually specify it every time - this makes sense for people who aren't professional writers, too; blogs as (mostly public) diaries -- with various drafts that are not yet published or are meant really only for your eyes - Should be able to use this to keep track where/when a piece was actually published - use case: so your editor has accepted your piece, and it's now published -- now connect the private copy your account with the published piece via URL - for that matter, you should also be able to dump links to various places where you've noticed conversations are happening about what you've written - these need to be dead simple -- they're *just* a list of links visible to you in your logged in view (albeit links that are classified as a "publication" or a "conversation") - To really make this work, need to inspire confidence with a *really* good story for import/export. XXX A dead simple approach: publish-to-email; see "Email is your electronic memory" from the Fastmail blog. Bonus: this provides a really convenient workflow for people who are already going to submit/share a piece with someone else via email -- they can just click "forward" and then pick the address of the person they intend to share it with. - "static pages" is an unfortunate name; for technical people, it will subvert their expectations, and I would bet it's not particularly helpful for non-technical people. Consistent usage of the "pinning" metaphor would be better. - writefreely README says "The quickest way to deploy WriteFreely is with Write.as"; should be updated for writefreely.host - The fanclub economy - TODO: Need to get the archive from original brainstorming session on socii XXX got it from Paul; need to get it into shape for presentation - letting people gift subscriptions - NFSN lets any registered use "send" funds to someone else's account (but it requires a request to NFSN staff, who will actually manually carry out the deposit); in theory, even if you stop paying or your plan lapses, your site can stay alive if you have enough fans willing to keep it alive (even without any effort on your part, past the first occurrence of sharing the account where funds can be sent to) - Driving product presentation by user stories. Here are two sides to the same coin: - People who hear about write.as and come to visit want to answer the question, "Can I use write.as to <X>?" - We can and should literally tell people the things they can do with write.as In other words, a page where we re-index and reshuffle the pricing matrix; *start* with the question/answer, and *then* point to the plan(s) that support it; this should complement the existing `/pricing` overview -- not replace it - Possible sales lead: law firms that want to have some semblance of a blog and end up making ad hoc deals (possibly in charge for ongoing maintenance of their Web presence) - Some kind of integration with GitHub pages? NB: This is perilous (is that crowd and their predilections what we want to attract?) XXX Okay, so actually more like integration with arbitrary static site hosts, by targeting S4 + several officially supported plugins. You author your posts in the writefreely writer, but they get "syndicated" (NB: not to be confused with RSS-/Atom-style syndication) to your static site, via S4 (NB: not the way that ghost integration works via targeted integration -- this would be totally generic via S4). - captioning video.write.as general accessibility issues XXX huh? - Sometimes, people post bare URLs. Include a copy-link widget? XXX need to check out new Prosemirror integration. - A conversational UI, palette bar (in the vein of SublimeText, VS Code) - If I create an anonymous post, I should be able to export the "key", etc. (otherwise ephemeral and invisible as browser cookies or in local storage or something) as a document - For that matter, a user should be able to export _all_ of the "personal" data that Write.as has associated with them -- a show of "nothing up our sleeve". - Join the Data Transfer Product - good opportunity for spreading the word (announcement: "Write.as is now a participant of in the Data Transfer Project") - good place to compare export features -- benchmarking against Google Takeout - users get a big ol' ZIP of their content, and a minimal offline "browser" for it (read: an index of that content) - be a founding member of "world takeout day" - people.kernel.org posts don't link back to people.kernel.org -- only the author's own namespace - Need to do something about how the GitHub Flavored Markdown-style newline handling screws up wrapping - Also need to do something about mandatory escaping for less than (<) and greater than (>) in some contexts and not others - Be your own competition. Instead of competing with e.g. proseful.com, launch an "anti-write.as" that does what write.as doesn't. It can capture the market for people interested in the kinds of things that would never be incorporated into write.as or writefreely for various reasons. Should *not* be branded as Write.as/Writefreely or have any incoming links from either. - The testimonial carousel on landing page needs controls - Glitch has a "raise your hand" feature. (Not sure how it works, though.) Suppose Write.as did something like that. You're writing and want some help working on a particularly thorny section. (This might be best as a submit.as feature?) Also, let someone (author or editor) highlight a section and record a snippet of "production notes" in audio form (e.g. using their laptop mic). - Simple podcast "hosting". But not really -- someone dumps their MP3s onto a CDN and writes the episode summaries with write.as, linking to it. A setting in the blog should let you generate an alternative feed, where the feed items are marked up appropriately so that users' feed readers work as expected (they get the audio, not just a post); Write.as just hosts the feed and provides the interface for writing posts - Embed.ly objects should get a caption - Set up an alert to nab joinplu.me in case registration ever lapses - Proactively begin backing up some of the most important Medium posts. (NB: just keep internal backups; not talking about republishing without authors' permission.) Alternatively, aggressively court people who have stopped blogging on Medium -- "Look, we've got a place for you here." - A destructo service for STRs - It looks like there's a ripe opportunity to foster a cottage industry focused on selling plugins (and offloading support burden)? Discourse threads: - `</t/replace-published-with-write-as/1513/7>` - `</t/migration-from-ghost-pro-to-write-as/2252>` - There's an embed widget (a glorified blockquote) on "Mystery Knowledge and Useful Tools" from nikhilism.com. It would be a nice addition to either Hypothes.is or Write.as if they came with tools that made it trivial to quote a piece of text for embedding like this. Use case: people who write a piece and hope for it to be widely discussed, so we provide tools (associated with the author's plan) so their readers can easily clip pieces of the article for embedding elsewhere (inc. Twitter). - A place for Hypothes.is-style annotations to evolve into a full-blown blog post. Use case: people listening to a podcast episode jot down some thoughts while listening. (See dwhly's existing Hypothes.is integration on docdrop.org for related prior art.) - Replace the Discourse instance with a purpose-built solution (XXX when the time is right) - On landing page for write.as integration on ghost.org, s/focussed/focused/g - Dead simple domain registration and hosting. I've seen people complain in general about not being able to truly "own" a domain. They want to "buy" it for life. How about approximating that experience -- you pay upfront for 100 years, and write.as takes care of renewals, etc. - Pro: great marketing gimmick? - Con: not necessarily able to make this guarantee -- 100 years for a customer is also 100 years for you -- so it would be indistinguishable from a "liftime subscription (for the duration of this service's life)", but since these are domain registrations we're talking about, it has to be priced appropriately (~$10 * 100 yr), so it may be unlikely that people generally would pay for this, outside the 1% of 1% who might do it on a lark - Themes pages need a (non image-based) link to the author's blog. - Various complaints someone had about writefreely: (Google for AOL keyword `wordsmith.social carbontwelve 22-365-grievances-with-writefreely`.) The no-cookie/no-password/no-email problem is interesting. I have a thought about how to prototype a solution to this with nice UX. Basically, a page that, when visited, would allow them in, even if they've cleared their cookies, never set a password, and never set an email address. (We use `pushState` or clever UX to make sure that an item appears in their browser history; the browser history itself is effectively the source for their recovery token, rather than email. We give them a distinctive phrase/URL fragment to Ctrl+F for when dredging.)