Svbtle was apparently "released" as a technical solution, but it quickly became clear to me that Dustin was more interested in the prestige of the invite-only "network" than the platform itself.
I haven't dug into Simvla enough to see if it has some of the interesting backend features—I hope so because otherwise this seems to be an academic exercise (pointing out on simvla.com that "there're many publishing platforms out there; hosted or non-hosted solutions are popping out like snails after a storm").
Hey simvla - looks good, but to actually be open source you need a license. Right now the source doesn't have a license, so it defaults to "All Rights Reserved". If you intended this to be open source as the title claims, can you add a license please? Thanks!
Can somebody tell me what is technically interesting about Svbtle? How is it different from, say, Tumblr? It seems to be just a normal CMS with a minimalistic look. It does attract a lot of prominent bloggers in tech, which, to me, has more to do with Curtis's personal connections than any technical merits.
For me, the best part of Svbtle is it's management and writing interface. They are geared towards getting you to write more. By considering drafts as 'Ideas' rather than actual posts, a huge mental block is released. Now you just jot down any half-baked thought that occurs to you and you can expand upon it later, when you have actually given it some thought. This is something you can already do in any other blogging platform, but the difference is there is no implicit expectation from the software that this will become a full fledged post. Which in turn allows you to write about stuff you probably would not have written before. It's a mental thing, and I'm afraid I can't really explain it better.
I'm pretty sure you answered your own question there. I don't know for sure but I tend to agree with your assessment. I wondered the same thing for a long time and I finally realized that this is one of those questions where the answer is so simple that you refuse to consider it because of how damn simple it really is.
Such assessment doesn't answer my personal question about why so many people are fixated with emulating, comparing and flat out copying Svbtle.
Dustin outlined some very cool design decisions when he first introduced Svbtle, but the presentation of final content wasn't incredibly unique which further confuses me. He shared some interesting workflow ideas which people are free to share, so why insist on publicly using Svbtle as some arbitrary benchmark?
I like how easy it is so get started with wordpress (PHP environment + famous simple "installer") and I find it's popularity staggering (very high proportion of ALL new websites)
However, after making custom themes and modules, and trying to hack others, and doing a fairly lengthy performance review I must say I intensely dislike it from a development perspective, particularly the architecture (or comparatively lack of).
I have a vision of a clean, well written and architected MVC blogging platform that is a joy to use for both users and developers.
It would have to be PHP/MySQL (simvla is Rails and unfortunately this just cuts off most of the market), I would use an established framework (CakePHP would be my preference).
I have been debating for about 12 months just writing it (possibly forking wordpress to help the core developers follow my decisions) but I know adoption would be governed by users, and do they want to change? No!
I've almost resigned myself to the fact that no matter how good my intentions, it would just end up another "snail after a storm"
I feel it would be easier to write from scratch than to fork Wordpress.
I share your dislikes of Wordpress though, and decided that writing a blogging platform myself was simpler than trying to hack Wordpress into doing what I wanted.
Personally I tend to stop reading wp-svbtle websites (and I've seen others say the same thing). Whilst many, like yourself, use it because it's nicely designed, to me it feels almost like the blogger is trying to deceive the reader. I like the look of Simvla because whilst the UI is still very similar and minimal, it looks different enough.
Is it really deceptive when only a handful of people (HN readers) even know what Subtle (did I spell that wrong?) is, and they can tell the difference immediately, despite the identical layout?
I'm curious, how does this offering compare to https://github.com/natew/obtvse (which I assume you encountered in your research)? Or is this not a valid comparison?
Svbtle is a very controversial Blogging platform in my opinion. It says it strives for quality unlike the rest, yet it is sometimes full of rants[1] by random people. Heck, it even has MG Seigler (MG is known for shitty quality, heavily biased content in the tech journalism world) in it. With that being said, blog networks like these should have a superior, fool-proof rating system (like Quora), so that people can filter out shitty content written for pageviews and to gain more subscribers, and focus only on quality-oriented articles.
As someone over here said, it is best to ignore such 'elitist' blog networks, because when you tear them apart into pieces, they're also mostly shit, like any other network and are no different.
Stay away, next time when someone tells you their platform is for 'elitists' and invite only. The best things in life are the ones that give everyone an equal opportunity to speak out their mind.
So, I like the idea of a Svbtle-like blogging platform (and recently launched a closed beta of something vaguely like this, but not really very like this at all), but I think that there are a few cases where this misses the point.
I think the signup page asks for far too much. First name, last name, email are fine, but then it asks for profession, icon, bio and a network color. I don't even know what a network color is, and I don't see that anywhere that it is explained.
The admin panel has a few inconsistent UI choices and I think falls victim to the notion that a simple color palette = minimalism. The writing panel is cluttered in my opinion, and doesn't seem to have had much thought put into it aside from copying what Svbtle has publicized. That isn't necessarily horrible as an MVP of course, but this doesn't show any improvement or uniqueness. That also isn't a crime, but I think that the changes made for the sake of being different were just that, and weren't evaluated for placement or use case studies.
This may seem overly critical, but it isn't intended to be so, but I think this shows telltale signs of being a copycat without having given much thought to the reasons WHY Svbtle is so appealing.
To paraphrase somebody (perhaps Kevin Smith) -- the reasons that most (movie) sequels fail are because they're copying the wrong thing. Most people look at Jaws and see a shark and a boat, but in reality, there's a love story there, there are ties of camaraderie, a tale of obsession, yadda yadda. Remakes capture the bit about the shark, and not much else, and I feel that's where this is falling down.
That isn't to say that it can't be turned around, but I recommend to the author to watch how people use it and try to make some decisions that aren't based on the Svbtle screenshots.
It's a good-looking project that shipped, and I feel like a lot of the criticism here isn't terribly constructive, and I hope that this is (but maybe it isn't). Grats to the author and good luck, but I think that the path to success is maybe a little more involved.
It's great that they think everyone should be heard equally and all but a closed network isn't such a bad thing just because it's closed. Svbtle maintains quality because it's closed. Open it up and it becomes the next Wordpress where everyone and their mom is publishing their half baked malformed ideas.
Still, I like this and if I weren't already happy with Octopress I'd pick it up in a heartbeat. I just didn't like their answer to the "Isn't this like Svbtle?" questions. You know, if you're gonna be a Svbtle copy then own it! There's absolutely no shame in that at all.
From an user pov I don't get the concept behind having a closed network in order to obtain quality content.
As an user, if I want to read high quality stuff I go here on HN, or to specific sub reddits: news aggregators are solving the problem of quality for me.
Instead it seems that the idea of having a closed network helps more to solve the problem of bloggers to have a quality, like-minded, audience.
>Svbtle maintains quality because it's closed. Open it up and it becomes the next Wordpress where everyone and their mom is publishing their half baked malformed ideas.
What quality? Most posts (over all aggregated contributors) are BS. 1 in 15 is maybe worth it.
If you're going to duplicate Svbtle, part of that is understanding the Dustin Curtis™ way of thinking. Simple, uncluttered, straightforward. This is just an absolute hackjob with a layer of paint to give the illusion of Svbtle. The essence is not there.
The simple, uncluttered thing (which, let's face it, Curtis is hardly the first to think of...) is the design. Who knows what the code for Svbtle is like?
It's not like Dustin claimed to be the first to think of an uncluttered design. He did put a lot of effort into making it work, and look really good though. (You probably know what I mean if you've tried to visually simplify something while enhancing its functionality!)
I would suggest an increase to the left padding on the text. Currently there is a thin colored bar that is between the content and the bio, and the content runs into it. Adding some space between them would make posts easier to read.
Anyone else notice the subtle typo in the title of this post? (At the time I am writing this, the title is: The open-source "svblte like" blogging platform).
Looks like an interesting product. I noticed a typo on this sentence "someone else are hidden under the hood." I think you mean "some others are hidden..."
Also, the input box inside the Drafts div, where you are supposed to enter the Post title (which is not very clear/intuitive) - the input box continues expanding overflowing the bounds of the containing div and all that. Need a max-length, word-wrapping solution there.
Because of the whole elitest nature of svblte, I actively go out of my way to ignore it. When the 'cool kid' in school doesn't want you to be in his group, you don't mimic him and try to be like him. You say fuck 'em, I'm going to do my own thing.
While I understand the sentiment; I do. Svbtle is nothing more than a network of blogs by various authors that one man (dcurtis) thinks have good substance. Your argument is roughly equivalent to me saying I'm starting my own newspaper because the Chicago Tribune won't print my article and wasting my time being all angry about it. Not worth it.
I haven't dug into Simvla enough to see if it has some of the interesting backend features—I hope so because otherwise this seems to be an academic exercise (pointing out on simvla.com that "there're many publishing platforms out there; hosted or non-hosted solutions are popping out like snails after a storm").