We are getting quite close to releasing themes for Posthaven. We have all sites running on our new theming engine and now need to finish up the new themes we are working on to make theming useful for everyone.
If you are among our more technical users (i.e. you know your way around the command line and know HTML and CSS), and would like to try building your own Posthaven theme get in touch at help@posthaven.com and we will get you started.
tl; dr: Themes are late due to family sickness, and a new infant in my life. But we care and are going to get this done.
This is a personal update, which may strike you as weird because a lot of people think of Posthaven as a startup. It's not a startup. It's a project that we want to give to the world, and it happens that the only way we can think of making it work long term is by charging for it. It's just the two of us, Brett Gibson and I, still. We do everything having to do with the site. It's a long term gardening job.
Like any gardener, you have short term tasks and long term tasks. In terms of maintenance, we've had minimal downtime and we're trimming the weeds. Site is doing fine. But the long term projects have not hit our goals.
We've been working on Themes for about 10 months. We spent $80,000 on development services (Viget Labs) and they did a great job. We have about 80 to 120 man hours worth of software engineering work left to get it over the line, and the last mile is the part we can't outsource because we care about the user experience too much. The good news is that you'll be able to write full CSS/HTML using the Liquid templating language, and it works quite a lot like the way Shopify has done their amazing layout engine. As a dev/designer - it's sweet.
Why's it late? Earlier this year, my mom got sick and had multiple life threatening surgeries this year including a triple heart bypass. (Lesson: Don't let your loved ones have untreated diabetes, even if they hide it.) I'm happy to report she is on the road to good recovery and we're very lucky. She moved in with me and I had to take care of her for most of the early part of this year. I also have other lucky news: My wife and I just delivered a 6 lbs 11.5 oz. baby boy named Garrison this week. But that also means my programming time is severely curtailed.
One final note: Brett and I have full time jobs with Y Combinator, and neither of us are taking salary from Posthaven. Your dollars pay for servers and for things that make the site run. We'll hire people down the road if that's the right thing for us. We never set out to make a lot of money with Posthaven. We just wanted this thing, and we knew we had to charge to make it happen.
When's it ready? I can't give a date. We got in trouble doing that before. All I can say is as soon as I can get to it. This thing is a long term priority for us, but short term issues intervene.
Please know that we do care. Brett has already been working on long term DevOps projects to make Posthaven servers more maintainable over the long haul, and those changes are already live. We're committed to this, and we want to do right by all of you who believe in us. Thanks for your support, and we're gonna get this done.
Sincerely,
Garry Tan, Co-founder, Posthaven
You've asked for it and it's here. Search on every Posthaven blog. Try it now from the homepage of any blog, in the sidebar:
Search on the archive page is actually 100% realtime thanks to the amazing Algolia Search API, which is the underlying service we use to deliver such a lighting fast feature.
More from us shortly, but enjoy and let us know if you run into any problems.
Happy New Year, Posthavenites. Theme engine efforts continue, with an initial internal alpha already done. More on that is coming. In the meantime, we're doing some new years cleaning and fixed a bunch of bugs.
Maintaining software is a lot like gardening — you've got to remember sweep and weed alongside your major landscaping projects too.
As always if you hit any bugs or have further requests, let us know at help@posthaven.com. We really appreciate the support.
Photo via halfrain
Hello from the Posthaven team. Don't worry, we're still tending to the site. We've been adding little things that might be hard to notice so we thought we'd call out a bunch of them out.
Switch posts between blogs — You can now click Post Settings on a post you're editing and switch the blog. This was an oft-requested feature we just didn't get to early on, but is pretty obvious that you'd want it when you think about it.
Export — Your content is yours, so you can switch whenever you want. While logged in, just visit https://posthaven.com/exports and you can easily export any of your Posthaven blogs to Wordpress format.
The stuff above is ready to rock, so try it out. We've also got a few things on deck that we'd like to share with you. Here's what's coming next...
Theming — We're working with friends of ours at Viget Labs to bring a world-class theme engine based on Shopify's Liquid gem. That's in progress and we expect to be able to have an early version of it in early 2015, along with a few new looks. The best part of it is you'll be able to use full HTML, CSS, and even HAML/SASS.
Commenting improvements — We'll be doing more on commenting, letting you selectively close posts for comment, as well as letting your commenters login using Facebook/Twitter.
Thanks for your support and for sticking with Posthaven. We will do you proud.
We're still hard at work getting themes ready for Posthaven sites, but in the meantime we've added a way to change the look and feel of your site for advanced users. If you know CSS you can now add CSS code to all the pages on your site. Find it on the Advanced tab in your site's settings on the dashboard:
A quick note about a small feature I just deployed: now on the dashboard when you edit your Posthaven profile you can upload a picture to go along with your name and bio.
Right now these show up below your bio in the sidebar on your site.
We're happy to announce Posthaven now supports multiple contributors per blog.
On your Posthaven dashboard in the settings for your site you will now find a "Contributors" tab where you can add and manage contributors. The owner of each email you add will be able create new posts on your site via email right away. They will also have the option to create a free contributor-only Posthaven account so that they can post via the web and edit their posts on your site.
Contributors who create an account and add a name to their profile will be listed on your blog and have their posts attributed to them. See this in action on our blog and on this post.
Let us know what you think at help@posthaven.com.
We're happy to announce that we've launched a feature many of you have been asking for — Email subscriptions for new posts on your blogs.
Now your blog readers can easily enter their email address to start receiving new posts in their inbox. See the link in the sidebar on your blog's homepage or below each post on that post's page:
Even more, in each site's Settings section on dashboard you can manage subscribers and add email addresses of family and friends to make sure they stay up to date on your blog without having to check it manually:
Finally, it's even easier as a Posthaven user because you can follow other Posthaven blogs and start getting updates with one click.
While you're at it, don't forget to subscribe to this Posthaven too (just below, see "Like this post?") — it's the easiest way for you to get notified whenever we add new features, which we are working furiously to deliver to you asap.
As always, keep in touch at help@posthaven.com.
Now you can autopost to LinkedIn profiles. Just go to your Settings > Autopost tab and click LinkedIn to hook up your account:
We've also updated the post editor so that you can easily change the display date of a post using your local time zone, which is automatically detected from your computer. The date also appears on the post URL in the sidebar, automatically set to the correct time for your blog reader based on their current time zone as well.
New features are coming as soon as we can write them. Thanks for your continued support!