Building Bloggie ー Summary #3

Since we started building bloggie, we decided to make it a point to write a summary every month. It serves as a reality check for ourselves as it gives a good visualization of what we've accomplished so far.

2 months have passed since the last time we made summary #2. Spring is already here, and sakura is blooming in Japan! It's time to write another summary.

(If you are not sure what bloggie is, you can read about why we build bloggie.io)

Summary #3

Below are the things that we had completed in the past 2 months.

Post Viewing/Editor

UI Improvement

• major revamp of the editor page
• improve UI of the post header area

Bug fixes

• save a post as 'untitled' when no title is entered

New features

• added image uploading progress indication
• added the auto-save feature for the editor
• added the sync-scrolling feature between the editor and the preview
• added image resizing feature by simple markdown syntax, e.g. =100x
• support emoji usage in a post
• support filename in a code block
• support embedding Tweet in a post
• support comment in a post

Stability & Security

• image resize before uploading to the server to prevent slow loading
• sanitize HTML in the editor for better security

General & Miscellaneous:

• added Tab View for editor preview in about page's editor demo
• added Terms & Privacy page
• added Favicon
• added Beta flag to logo
• added about page with an editor demo
• added a simple homepage
• improve the UI of the Navigation Bar
• improve the UI of the profile page
• open for beta use!

Onboarding & Community:

• created Twitter account
• support login through Twitter & Github authorization
• collected a few emails from a few interested users
• created a post to explain why we build bloggie

Infrastructure:

• support SSL
• install Airbrake for error monitoring
• setup canonical URL to look like: @username/title-of-post
• setup metatag for home page
• install Webpacker

Kudos to @kinopyo who did all the heavy lifting in coding!

Launching quick vs. continue building?

Having the correct idea is crucial, but it is just the beginning of a journey. Making it into a reality is the tough part. After building bloggie.io for around 4 months, it has transformed from a concept to a product with a name. We can now sign up and actually use it. We start to have a good feeling about bloggie!

Up to now, we have been busy building the product. However, it's easy to fall into the trap of building a product that nobody wants, so it's important to get the product out quickly to potential users to validate our idea.

As a counter-argument, if we launch it too quickly when the core of the product is not polished enough, we couldn't validate if our idea is bad or if our implementation is bad. There is no absolute way to find out if we should launch it quicker or to continue adding more features.

In the end, we decided to launch it as soon as we have the following feature properly completed:

• onboarding: a good signup & login process
• creation: a good writing experience
• viewing: a good reading experience

To sum it up

There are a lot going on in bloggie.io as well as our lives, but we certainly enjoy building this, and we will continue to grow this into a solid blogging platform catered for software developers.

Bloggie.io is currently still in beta, but you are already able to sign up from our home page, we currently provide 2 ways of registration:

• Twitter
• Github

Please give it a try, and feel free to leave your feedback in our Twitter!