April 2020 Updates
We're starting this month off with an old habit we dropped for a while — monthly updates! April saw a ton of improvements to the platform, new releases, and new aspects to Write.as that we're excited to share with you here.
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WriteFreely Beta
Since late 2018, we've been quietly working away on a large open source software project. It's called WriteFreely, and it powers the entire Write.as platform. Today we're excited to release version 0.12, and launch some brand new services around our software.
A Revolution in Write.as Design
At Write.as, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to strip away the unnecessary. We craft pared-down writing tools for people who want a reprieve from the digital cacophony. We build these tools with ❤️, for the artists and makers striving for less in a world that only wants them to consume more.
We've pushed the boundaries over the past five years, and worked tirelessly to distill blogging down to its purest form and most necessary function. Finally, after all this time, our work is done. What we've arrived at is nothing short of perfection.
Now we're taking Write.as into the future (with a nod to the past), beyond the traditions of minimalism that have grown to restrict our true artistic tendencies. Today we're excited to reveal a revolutionary new façade for Write.as, the “weblog,” and indeed the web itself.
5 Years
Write.as is turning 5 years old! 🎂 To celebrate our 50th anniversary (in internet years), we're launching a new subscription option for everyone — more on that below.
Write.as Letters
For the past few months, we've been testing out a long-requested feature on Write.as: email subscriptions. This gave readers yet another way to stay connected with your writing from the convenience of their inbox — and like the rest of our platform, it was built to respect their privacy.
After listening to your feedback and sending out many thousands of emails, today we're happy to roll this feature out as Write.as Letters — an easy way to start an email newsletter, backed by a beautifully simple Write.as blog.
Introducing our new Community Manager, CJ!
Today we're excited to officially welcome our new head of community on Write.as, CJ! If you're a Write.as user, you might recognize him from his insightful writing on his Write.as blog, to his creative projects built on the Write.as API, to his overall helpful presence on our forum. We're overjoyed to have crossed paths with him, and to now have him on the Write.as team.
As you may know, we're a very small team of people behind the Write.as platform. But from our early days as a one-man show we've prided ourselves on having a human touch to go along with otherwise robotic software on a cold screen. Now with CJ on board, we'll be able to continue bringing a little humanity to your favorite writing device, as a welcome respite from the chatbots and automated systems you get on other platforms.
As a customer or user, you'll start to hear more from CJ going forward. Even if you don't need any help right now, please feel free to stop by the forum and join us in welcoming him!
Command-line Interface v2.0
Today we're happy to release v2.0 of our command-line interface! Now Pro subscribers can publish to their Write.as account and blogs, and everyone can sync any anonymous posts you've already published.
Our command-line tool is great for power users that want to build Write.as into their normal writing workflow. For example, it can be used in shell scripts or combined with your favorite editor to connect all stages of your writing and publishing process.
In fact, our Linux desktop app is built on top of our command-line tool! So while the app isn't yet updated to take advantage of the CLI's newest features, you can still install this new version, run writeas auth <username>, and then all of your posts published from the desktop app will be connected to your account. Neat, eh?
As mentioned earlier, publishing to your account with the command-line tool is available with a Pro subscription. However, everyone can continue publishing anonymously, and now sync existing posts to their account, for free. We know that many people might've invested time in the CLI assuming that they'd be able to sync their posts one day, so we certainly don't want to prevent that.
Download the Write.as CLI v2.0 here and read the full release notes here.
What's next
With this update out the door, we're quickly moving on to supporting all WriteFreely instances with the command-line tool. Anyone interested should keep an eye on the WriteFreely blog for that update. And as always, we'd love to hear what you think on the forum!
New Integration: Ghost
Today we're excited to announce a new integration with another open source blogging platform, Ghost. This enables you to compose posts in our distraction-free editor and seamlessly publish them to your Ghost blog, no matter where it's hosted. To get started, check out this integration guide from the Ghost team!
This comes as a direct replacement for our previous Medium integration. Earlier this year, we learned that Medium had dropped our API access without any forewarning. Writers were publishing posts here expecting them to show up on their Medium blog, but they never did.
We later learned that Medium was trying to mitigate spam — but the damage was already done. We got burned, and didn't want to continue resting our reputation on a platform that doesn't respect the developers building on it. That's where Ghost came in.
The Ghost team reached out to us shortly after we published that blog post in January, and suggested we integrate with them, instead. The timing was perfect — they were getting ready to launch a new Admin API (just announced this week) that enabled publishing to any Ghost blog. We jumped on the opportunity, and were happy put our effort towards growing an ecosystem of open, resilient publishing tools, rather than walled gardens like Medium.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think about this new integration, and any ways we might improve it, over on the forum!
Extending Write.as
On an internet filled with complicated products, with complex legal terms and inscrutable business models, simplicity is something we all crave more in our digital lives. Write.as was built to be that simple space for expressing yourself — a reprieve from the bloated, distracting web.
Yet as we've fought to stay simple over the years, we've grown more useful to more people — no easy feat while keeping such a focus. Today, we're evolving our pursuit of simplified complexity with Extend Write.as, our add-on directory and marketplace.
Extend Write.as is a place for everyone to extend their normal abilities on the platform with new features. It's a place for our new experiments, alternative defaults, and more publishing tools. It's where you'll find new ways to customize your blog, and new tools to offer your readers.
As part of this new section, we've changed the number of blogs included with new subscriptions, and made it so anyone can add more blogs to their account. There's no longer any limit to blogs on your account — you can add as many as you want for $12 per year per blog, even without subscribing to Casual or Pro. (Read more about this change on our In the open article.)
Next, you'll find new ways to customize and export your blog on Extend, as well as our alternative web editor, the Classic Editor — currently being tested in Write.as Labs. Beyond that, you might find Extend features as part of WriteFreely, or even build your own features that we'll then showcase.
We're excited to launch this next stage for the platform, and can't wait to start adding more capabilities. As always, we'd love to hear what you think on the forum!
Ending our Medium integration
Sometime in the past few weeks, Medium abruptly deleted third-party access to their publishing API. There was no warning before, or notice after, this happened — apps just stopped working (including ours).
When anyone on Write.as tries to interact with Medium now, the response we get from their API is plain:
Application not found (6005)
So unfortunately, we've removed our Medium integration. You'll no longer see the option to connect a Medium account or cross-post to one in the editor.
We contacted Medium's team to see how we could regain API access. But then, after a little more thought, we decided to make this change permanent, and not continue support for their platform, regardless of what their response is.
Update 11:33am EST: we received a response from Medium, though it's still confusing:
We recently experienced an interruption with API, and the ability to generate new oAuth-based applications has been restricted. I have reenabled that feature.
This doesn't really explain why our 2-year-old integration suddenly stopped working (we didn't need to generate a new application). So I'm asking for more clarification.
Our original goal in supporting the Medium API was to create more bridges between different web silos. That was part of the promise of Medium back when it started, after all — a network of blogs, instead of individual islands. When they opened their API, we knew that would be the perfect chance to help writers connect with more readers.
We trusted that Medium might not do what many VC-funded platforms have done before: open an API, attract developers and users, grow, then shut it all down. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they did. And unlike their previous pivots, they didn't even give the courtesy of a small heads-up.
It's this pattern of disregard for everyone else, as they clamor for a business model, that is mostly driving our decision to part ways. They've done a lot of good for the web (and indeed helped inspire Write.as). But we believe there's a better way forward, and based on their decisions, they probably won't be a part of it.
With this change, we'll be honing the focus of our product even more, evolving the open source software behind it all, and continuing to build a sustainable, human-centric platform for publishing on the web.