2 posts tagged

Product Ideas

A case for a new blog engine

Bear with me here. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s worth it to write my own blog engine.

As a clever man said:

In the past few years I’ve been trying to store my writing locally, but writing in public is powerful. It is excruciating to keep writing on the web (especially with inline images, like here) up to date with local notes. And “local” here doesn’t mean “stored in a repo”, like for a static site, because a repo is separate from where I’m writing: it has been Evernote, then Notational Velocity, then nvALT, now Bear, and soon, hopefully, my own open-source project.

I offer a new paradigm: own your writing, publish everywhere. Now it’s usually backwards, you’re writing on the internet somewhere and then maybe, if the service lets you, export what you’ve written.

What does this have to do with a blog engine? It’s a start, where the CMS, or the publishing platform, will only be a container for published writing, not its master location.

My current engine, Aegea, is woefully inadequate due to it being closed-source. And Wordpress and the like are either too cumbersome to setup the way I need (I have a small, but _opinionated_ (as they say) set of necessary features) or don’t have what I need at all.

A static site would fit the bill but it doesn’t have comments, and no, Disqus won’t cut it.

In the end, I _want_ to write one. I’ve been learning some Go and this is a great opportunity to write a medium-sized web-service, which I have never done before. And it’s very motivating because I want to keep my writing published. I’m quite sure a minimal version can be done in a week, so that I can migrate to it, and its incompleteness should motivate me to work on it further.

I have already compiled a minimal list of features to implement first and it’s manageable, so there’s hope.

Can’t wait to share what I come up with.

2018   Product Ideas   Spisali   Tech

Low Res Photo

Sometimes, when you’re on the go, you just want a smaller photo. Your cell signal isn’t very strong, you want to snap and share something unimportant and delete the photo afterwards, or you don’t want people on the internet to read notes scattered on your table that you shared on your social network of choice, or maybe you’re abroad and want to conserve bandwidth on your tourist SIM card.

iOS will let you resize a photo only when you’re sending an email, but don’t we share photos on messengers much more often? You can also start an editor, load the photo in it and resize manually to a specific size, then save it to the Camera Roll, go back to Photos.app and share it from there. Sounds a bit tedious.

Low Res Photo is an app with just four buttons: Snap, Select, Save, Share. Yes, “choose” is better, but I want my extra S!

Snap a photo or Select it from the library. Save the smaller version of the selected image or Share its resized version.

There are no size or ratio or scale controls. The image is resized to be 800 px on its largest size, or not resized if it’s smaller than that.

 No comments   2017   iOS   Product Ideas