* I primarily see this as, not a traditional website builder, but as a way to take paper journals and transform them into web journals/blogs.
* As someone who has tried all manner of tools and software for journaling (literally like tens of software apps), I've found that my brain just works best with a nice paper journal and a great pen (I highly recommend the prismacolor premier fine marker). It just works far better for me than anything else.
I'm so glad this project is at the top of HN. It is the ultimate "hacker project" of someone that scratched a personal itch, and found out other folks would be willing to pay for it.
You could name pages like "Home", "About", "My trip to Paris". And then write on the piece of paper "[link to My trip to Paris]"
Or you could write "[link from Posts]" to add it to a common listing.
You'd basically just create a written form of Markdown.
When I'm reading a post, I rarely click any links at all.
I was a little surprised that the paper part is used only for plain text. It would sort of make sense to have at least a few formatting and layout features.
Here is dang's comment about that topic/meme [1]
It's cool, I've never shipped a project like this, and probably never will. But I've worked on my fair share of software so I know what it takes behind the scenes.
Because you are a developer, you are thinking in gpt/ocr/website building etc. Lot of people especially older generations eager to share stuff will find this useful if not amusing. For them its write something on paper and get a link back. Real users don't care about WordPress plugins.
They are looking at it that way. Because what you just described would be great for the user. The only problem is that what you described doesn't match how this service actually works. That it should work like but doesn't is the entire basis for Philip-J-Fry's comments. Both comments here make it clear enough what he or she is talking about, so the response admonishing them (to empathize with the users) is odd.
Would adding new features make it easier to create more complex pages? Yes. Would it improve the experience for the users? I doubt it. It's like adding full text editing mode to a chat - technically viable, but takes away the magic - just give me text and emojis and stop there.
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No doubt we're all more motivated by ego than we believe we are, but comments that take a supercilious stance and put everybody else down don't help—and are not part of the culture we're hoping for here.
Of course, turning a functional program into a function business is no simple feat, but no one should be looking at these things and thinking “it takes a genius with a once-in-a-lifetime idea” — because, well, it clearly doesn’t. And it’s really not the most incredible or innovative idea.
The intelligence was largely in transforming something you could do into something you could easily do — and identify that it has a potential for profit, and identify how to extract that profit, and executing on it long enough to achieve that profit.
The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.
Like, you've still got to edit the page to add links, images, colours, etc. In fact, that seems like the most complicated part.
It's a fun gimmick and a nice selling point. But someone will be able to use this idea for Wordpress/Wix/Squarespace plugin. Would be surprised if they didn't produce their own feature to do the same thing eventually.
It'd be way cooler if you could draw links on the page and it would figure that out. Or draw a box with some links in it and generate a header. Draw a box for a place holder image and generate that. The next iteration would obviously be using paper to design the actual site and then using CV to generate the markup/styling.