From a product point of view, it sounds compelling. You (currently anyone Evan likes) publish to a collection (theme or topic) and choose a layout style that’s best suited to the content you’re sharing. The community (currently anyone who wants to sign in via Twitter) may then vote up articles within each collection.

Evan Williams, on publishing content to Medium:

We believe that good design supports the purpose (not just the appeal) of content, so Medium is diverse in look and feel—ranging from different types of articles to images to, eventually, much more.

Dave Winer is, of course, worried about the platform:

Please let Medium be something more than another high-walled silo for capturing people’s writing. … Do this one project without regard for capturing content.

But, I have to wonder, when you’re designing and building a new product on a new platform, how much of a distraction is it to consider building an open platform when you’re still trying to figure out your product.

Unlike App.net, where the product is the platform, Medium is trying to redefine publishing, not platform access.

As Evan says:

We haven’t tied everything in Medium together yet, partly because we expect our ideas to evolve rapidly as we experiment and learn from usage.

I suppose it doesn’t seem too much different than Squidoo, where you create a collection of the things you know and love, but the curatorial process and attention to content detail will hopefully help great content rise to the surface.

That, of course, assuming it’s not a circle jerk of like-minded people fulfilling their own expectations by voting up articles that all share the same lens into whatever topic is being discussed.

And, hey, congrats to our friends at Teehan+Lax who were part of the design team.

The post Exploring Medium, a new web publishing platform from Evan Williams appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Craig Saila just shared Readability, Instapaper, the Network and the Price we Pay by Anil Dash. In Anil’s words:

Since the success of the recent Readability app on iOS, things have gotten tense, not between the creators of [Instapaper and Readability], but between supporters, fans and enthusiasts in the community for both apps.

Case in point: John Gruber called Readability “scumbags” for hosting content and not sending user’s back to the source websites of that content, in addition to holding on to cash they’ve earmarked for publishers.

Anil and Zeldman disagree:

Followup from Gruber:

UPDATE, 1 APRIL 2012: My use of the word scumbags has drawn condemnation from Jeffrey Zeldman and Anil Dash — both of whom (a) sit on Readability’s advisory board, and (b) I consider my friends. I take back nothing, and judge Readability only by their actions, but allow me to take another crack at the above:

I’ll give you the reason: Readability has long exhibited a profound sense of entitlement to work published by others. They collect — and if unclaimed, keep — money on behalf of publishers with whom they have no relationship, and so I find it in-character for them to now steal page views too. Everyone knows shared links should point to the original resource.

I’m not sure it’s fair just yet to label this behaviour as “stealing” or assume a sense of entitlement is driving these actions. That’s certainly how things appear on the surface, but this saga has yet to play out. As others (who are not on Readability’s advisory board) have stated, this may be more of good people trying to figure out a tough problem rather than scumbags screwing other people over.

A perspective which is essentially covered in Mike Davidson’s post, “What the Betamax case teaches us about Readability” and the comments which follow. Though he does bring up some fair points about copyright concerns presented by Readability:

By facilitating the public retransmission of an author’s content in a format not authorized by the author, it would seem that Readability is committing copyright violation, en masse.

But let’s get back to Anil:

As I started to get dragged into a discussion with John on Twitter tonight about how “we can legitimately disagree about the mechanics of this payment method and suggest ways to improve it”, I realized: We’re doing it again. We’re fucking ourselves. We’re crabs in a barrel, all pulling each other down, and the whole web is going to lose as a result.

And this is how we all lose with this kind of in fighting between tech industry friends and colleagues. Anil on his Moveable Type vs Matt Mullenwegg’s WordPress:

And the thing is, [choosing sides] can be effective, because it does help the eventual winner.

Which is never either of the players that are engaged in the stupid battle.

Because when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.

How we lose:

I strongly fear we’re about to cause the same damage to the reading tools market that we did through our stupid fights in blogging. We’ve got two great, vibrant reading tools that are innovating in the space. To my mind, they’re entirely complementary and should really be working together. As I see it:

• Readability is a really useful network for encouraging and supporting reading, that syncs up your reading content to apps on any device. Its own apps are just a few good choices among the many that connect to the network.
• Instapaper is a powerful, best-in-class reading app for serious readers. It has a passionate community that supports it, and focuses on being a great iOS experience.

To me, they’re just not competitors. It’s only the most short-term thinking that would make them so. But those who are fixated on that short term thinking might want to get their shots in on their less-favorite player. And if they do so, they’ll destroy both.

Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.

And the only survivors will be the competitors with inferior products who don’t have nearly as good an experience, as much passion for innovation, or as much love for the web. What those competitors do have, in some cases, is $100 million in venture capital funding. Enough to wait it out while these two tiny little bootstrapped players get torn apart by their own fans.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Unfortunately, this brings me right back home to the Toronto tech community, and a disconnect between a couple of influential individuals. The two Daves haven’t been able to get on the same page and being at lager heads surely only serves to undermine our community. The winner in this case, of course, will be another city.

I wish I had the answer for that one.

The post Tech industry infighting and the ongoing saga of Instapaper and Readability. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Author bios

Tumblr doesn’t have a place where I can write a little bit about myself. As our colleague Danie-j said when she was hacking together her blog “What’s the point in putting a blog up if no one can contact me?” With Khoi Vin and John Gruber lamenting this on their recent posts, the lack of identity on Tumblr is being noticed outside the community as well.

In fact, in order to get my name & photo in the sidebar (look left) using Tumblr’s theming variables while maintaining the Say Yeah design standards, I’ve had to change the name and avatar of my primary Tumblr blog.

We also lost the ability to show all the articles by a specific author, which we had on our previous platform (see image below). This means we can’t show how active our authors are or collect their posts together for easy reading.

It’s also unclear what order Tumblr is putting the authors in. It appears to be completely random; neither alphabetical or in order of when we added them.

Tumblr is all about content, but doesn’t have a home for information about the people creating the content. The addition of user profiles would be welcomed.

Multiple layouts per site

In the interest of simplicity, I can see why Tumblr sites only support one template. However, with the addition of pages, and more complex data types, allowing me to specify base layouts for different sections of the site would be welcome. It’s not necessary in the majority of simple blog sites, so I understand why it’s not available.

That said, with the absence of more Author Bios, we thought we’d build some custom bio pages, pulling in Twitter feeds and other content. There’s simply no way to do this without supporting more than one template.

While we’re on the topic of programmatic wants, it would also be nice to have page level variables passed through to the templates, to allow for page specific CSS. For example, highlighting the current page a user is on in the menu. To handle this for now we’ve had to use Javascript, which isn’t exactly ideal.

Queued daily

The queuing feature is great. We can line up articles for the week, and get back to our daily lives. The only trouble here is that there is no option to exclude weekends (or any specific day for that matter).

As a result, we’ve had to opt for the more granular control of manually setting post dates for each article. With multiple authors, it would be easier to manage if we could just throw everything into the queue and have the system sort it out but, as a business blog, we don’t see much benefit to posting over the weekend.

Items in the queue note when they’ll be published in minutes, which is totally useless if the publish time is greater than one hour. It would be much easier to understand when something is going to be published if the queue used a date format like the one you use when you set the post date for the future. (ie, Aug 18, 10am). Instead, we see this:

Consistency for group blogs

Primary blogs have neat tricks like using your profile photo as a favicon. Not so on group blogs.

What would be really nice is having a quick edit button on each post. On your primary blog, you’ll see these quick links in the top left:

But a group blog is treated like any other stranger’s blog, so instead of having a quick edit option on Say Yeah posts, we’ve got this:

With no way to filter or search posts in the Tumblr admin, that means I have to scroll through dozens of posts to find the one I want if I need to edit an old one. A terrific waste of time!

Import options!

Of course, the most important feature if Tumblr wants to get existing blogs to move to their platform is to help users get their existing content on the system. Now that we’re on Tumblr, we’re not concerned about that, but man it sucked recreating all of the articles from sayyeah.com and ineedsugar.com.

So that’s our wish list. Happy Tumbling!

The post Dear Tumblr, please bring me these features appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Things we’ve gained

Speed

I won’t get into the dirty details, but our previous publishing platform used a method of database query and template language that had some great flexibility, but unfortunately it was at the cost of performance. Hopefully you’ve noticed that the new blog is much zippier, because that’s one of the main reasons we made the switch.

Steady feature growth

We may not want to use every new Tumblr feature, but it’s great to see they’re constantly improving their service. We had a big wish list of things we wanted to add to our previous blog, but never had the time to tackle any of the items on that list. With Tumblr, we’ll get to discover great new features as they’re released. And we know that implementation is never more than a few minutes of template updates.

Mobile view

Check your iPhone, Tumblr automatically creates a nice iPhone view, hassle free.

Easy publishing

We were pretty pleased with our own administrative system, supporting drafts, queueing up future articles and much more, but we still had to work to get all of our content into the blog. With Tumblr, we have access to a bookmarklet, email based publishing, automatic resizing of uploaded images, and many other convenient ways of pushing content to our blog. Making content publishing easier means we can focus on sharing stuff instead of spending our time figuring out how to get the content in the system.

Audience & social media integration

It’s no secret that Tumblr is pretty popular. Beyond all the fans that we can now connect with on Tumblr itself, we can also use its automatic Twitter and Facebook publishing tools to increase article exposure and save time sharing content with those other networks.

Things that have caused us pain

Broken URLs

Moving required us to use the Tumblr URL structure, which is different than what we used on our own platform. While we did move all of the old articles to Tumblr, with no ability to set up URL aliases, if you try to access any articles at their old URLs, you’ll get a 404 error.

Template limitations

Speaking of 404 errors, the way that Tumblr handles templates for pages and errors leaves much to be desired. Templates are pretty basic, and while Tumblr has different output templates for each content type (ie, videos, audio, quotes), it uses the standard ‘Text’ template for everything else, including pages and errors. This complicates things. Since you can’t use the templates to determine if someone is looking at an error page, or a blog entry, you can’t style the pages to fit the needs of the content and the user. There are also no page level variables, which makes it tricky to show users what page they’re on in the menu structure.

Image handling

While building out our site template, we also ran into an issue with preset image resizingwhich unfortunately only includes 5 fixed sizes, the largest being 500 pixels wide. Our original blog, which we were working to emulate as closely as possible, was 562 pixels wide. This presented a problem since uploading to Tumblr resizes our full width images to 500 pixels wide.

For the launch of our new Tumblr site, we felt this blog width issue would be easy to overcome by hosting full width 562 pixel images on our own server, but it quickly became clear the best long term solution was to shrink the width of our blog for the convenience of utilizing Tumblr’s image controls. We made the switch from 562 to 500 pixels this weekend, but now we have 100+ articles left to go through and reupload our images. Painful stuff, but not as bad as having to recreate all the articles from scratch.

Migration is painful

Tumblr has no tool to automatically import articles from other sources. (One of the alternative platforms we reviewed, poster.us, can import articles from just about anywhere, but we’re not keen on their attitude). Importing 125+ articles by hand, one at a time, and updating image links was not pleasant, and I wouldn’t do it again. (Thankfully there is an export feature, so we have options should we wish to move in the future.)

WYSIWYG Editor

Traditionally, WYSIWYG editors suck, and the Tumblr editor is no exception. It doesn’t allow for deprecated HTML tags, which is in theory awesome, but in reality we still need to use iframes, and they aren’t considered part of XHTML, so they get stripped. At times, the editor tries to refactor code, sometimes in unexpected ways. ie, wrapping every element in a <p>, which causes unexpected layout issues. While the editor can be disabled for blog posts, the new(ish) page feature doesn’t allow you to circumvent the editor, which caused a few headaches while we were getting everything setup.

Commenting

Tumblr doesn’t have comments. Instead their philosophy focuses on liking and reblogging articles, which is actually quite good at helping to increase content exposure within the network, but not as well understood by users outside Tumblr. You can hack in a Disqus commenting thread, but personally I’m not a fan of Javascript widgets. Of course, this meant that we’d lose our intuitive login/commenting interface from our original site, but that isn’t too much of a concern because we’re averaging fewer than one comment per article.

On the Web

We learned on launch day that some companies block Tumblr on their work computers, so we lose some of the corporate audience there. That sucks, but we can also expect that the more corporate friendly blogs end up on Tumblr, the more likely we’ll see this ban lifted.

We’re also now beholden to Tumblr’s quality of service and maintenance schedule, which we had more control over when we were hosting the site on our own hardware. Like Gmail and Amazon web services, we’re counting on Tumblr keeping up with their growth and not fail whaling us on a regular basis.

Yay Tumblr!

Even though the lists of trouble points is more than double the list of benefits, in reality, the pros far outweigh the cons, and we’re very happy with the move to Tumblr.

As the Tumblr platform evolves and matures, we expect the issues that we have today will be resolved, and we’ll be posting our Tumblr wish list next Tuesday in the hopes that we can help nudge Tumblr in the right direction on a few of these items.

In the meantime, with the most important limitation of moving to the Tumblr platform being importing your existing content, you can really start to take advantage of Tumblr now simply by designing your articles to be 500 pixels wide and encouraging reblogging as a form of sharing content.

The post The pros & cons of moving to Tumblr. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

We made the decision this year that we wanted to focus on one thing and one thing only, building apps that help make your life easier and more enjoyable.

For the past three years we’ve been building and maintaining an app that makes our life easier for publishing content, but we haven’t shared this with you. That’s just silly. This left us with two options, focus on getting that app out there for you or put ourselves in a position where we didn’t have to keep maintaining our own publishing platform.

Recent developments in online publishing (tumblr, posterous and squarespace for example) have meant that we now have access to other publishing tools that make it a breeze to share content, maintain sites, and solve most of our feature set desires. Additionally, we have other apps we want to focus on now. So we made the decision to back away from our publishing app.

This meant we needed to find a tool that would allow us to do just one thing as effortlessly as possible: share content. And after looking at tumblr, posterous and squarespace, we’re now pleased to say this site is running on tumblr!

Now, we’ve certainly made some sacrifices in this transition, not the least of which is having no control over the URL format (so any old links are broken, including TO Events Calendar event links. Whoops!). Matt will be sharing a post shortly on what’s missing, changed, or what we’d like to see from tumblr. Stay tuned!

The post Let’s Tumbl. appeared first on Say Yeah!.