Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by cercatrova on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:39PM (#29454874)

Quite impressive, I didn't get it at first because I thought it was just MDX. Then I saw that there were changes in the video such as "```js focus=2,4[9:30],6", ans I saw that the code in the video was highlighted differently, then I understood the product. It's a way to annotate code more deeply than just with MDX. You need to make that much more explicit IMO, it needs to be quite clear when people read the site. I recommend a site that is more long form and describes the features well.

Also get rid of the weird "sponsorship for unlocking documentation" model. Make the library sponsorware if you need to, as in you can't see the code until you sponsor, but why would you make the docs sponsored? They're what might entice people to actually pay to use your software. As someone else said, you're actually crippling your own sponsorships by hiding marketing material behind a paywall. Marketing should be free so that as many people see it as possible, and some subset will buy. If you cut off the top of that funnel, you just get fewer people buying.

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by nmstoker on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:50PM (#29454946)

Agree completely.

I could eventually figure out what it was doing but the speed of the videos flipping between examples looks like it was set by people who already knew what the message was, rather than for people who don't know it (yet)

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by cercatrova on Sunday December 05, 2021 @07:54PM (#29454970)

Indeed, and that's always the issue with product creators writing their own marketing pages eh? They don't know how to dissociate themselves from the product and to look at it in terms of a normal person with no connection to or knowledge of the product.

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by Noumenon72 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @08:39PM (#29455245)

Thirded. I came away from this thinking, "Oh, this is a way to make those little code blocks with colored text on black background."

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by aarondf on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:08AM (#29456377)

I'd be curious your take on https://torchlight.dev. I went more long form.

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by bhauer on Monday December 06, 2021 @12:58AM (#29456644)

I'm not the same person, but for whatever it's worth, I found it easier to understand Torchlight from your landing page. It has less emphasis on social validation and more on specifically what the software does, which speaks more loudly to me as a reader. Also, just using scrolling to allow the reader to digest the core features rather than a too-fast animation loop helps tremendously for digesting something new.

I also appreciate that you didn't throw around many unfamiliar technologies, with an assumption that all readers will be as looped into the same technology ecosystem. "Blade templates" is unfamiliar to me, but I can see from the code at the right, you're just illustrating another source file format that doesn't highlight well with traditional highlighters; it's not important for me to know what Blade is.

About the only section I'd say could use some work is the installation section, where a bunch of PHP ecosystem tech is mentioned, all of which is foreign to me. Maybe a, "Not a PHP developer? Here's a quick walk-through of what you need to know..." (linking to another page.)

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Re:Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting by AnyTimeTraveler on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:10AM (#29458746)

I think your 5000 requests per month for the businesss tier are a bit on the low side. Especially, since there is nothing above that.

Maybe add a "Need more? Contact us" tier.

Also, I'd love to use this with technologies other than PHP. I use Rocket (Rust) in one of my projects and tried to check out the standalone cli as my only option.

The link to it didn't work on firefox mobile.

Thankfully clicking on any of the PHP things worked and brought me to the same docs where I could then navigate to the CLI.

Maybe highlight it more that you don't even need special integration with the Webserver, since it's possible to preprocess pages with your cli utility.

That part was not immediately obvious and might have turned me away, had I not been determined to see what the CLI tool did.

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