DevXBlog (discontinued)

Unfortunately, I am closing down this project too. I have lost motivation to work on it, as it was solving a problem for me, but I was reinventing too many wheels.

Although I had a fun experience building it and learned a lot from doing so, it didn't make sense from a business perspective to put more time in it.

I was using it actively to host https://vladcalin.ro, and I found myself lacking a lot of the features needed for it to be considered a MVP. I am not talking about fancy features like management for URLs and alerts when external URLs break, I am talking of simple things like themes.

I have found that providing a good enough theme library will take me a lot of time and effort for a mediocre result. Web design isn't my strong suite, and to build a good enough theme library would either require me to spend a lot of time to ramp up my web design skills, or pay somebody else to do it. I didn't want to spend so much time to upgrade my technical skills (although I might get some boos for saying that) but I ventured a bit too hard into an area I don't have enough expertise in. And that hurt my speed of delivery.

And the first rule of indie hacking or startups in general being "move fast and break things" I found myself in the position of not being able to move fast enough.

So, I changed my personal website hosting to Ghost, as it is good enough for my needs, and I am shutting down DevXBlog for good.

In the last few months, the time to sink in DevXBlog was kind of limited, so the progress wasn't really what I would have liked it to be.

But I am still working on it here and there. There are some things that I need to add to be satisfied with the project, before I release it to the public and hopefully make some $$$ from it.

But right now, I am the sole "customer" that is using it for a personal blog: https://vladcalin.ro

There are still some features that I need and I am working on adding them:

• Some more themes. Right now I have only one theme to choose from, which is rather basic. I'd like to have at least three before I release it, so customers would have more choices and not have all websites hosted on https://devxblog.com look exactly the same.
• Link tracking. I want to have an "inventory" of the links I use throughout my blog, so I can stay on top of the broken links, and maybe even insert some affiliated links here and there.
• Payments. Kind of obvious why. Right now, I don't have anything like this, but I am looking into integrating with Stripe.
• Custom themes, so people won't be limited only to the themes I provide. If they want to expand or give their website a personal touch, they should be able to do just that.
• Custom code insertion on the websites, in case they need to integrate with 3rd party analytics or other services that require inserting some code snippets in the page.
• Some tutorials and guides about the features, so people can access some information about what they can do in the platform.

Those would be the big ones, that once they are done, I will start actively promoting the project and kickstart it as a business.

Some nice to haves that I also plan to do sometime in the future:

• paste image directly into the WYSIWYG editor.
• some integrations with 3rd parties? Maybe some analytics services, content, stock image providers, etc.
• background processing for some plugin system. I would like to transform DevXBlog into a platform rather than a website builder and host. That means that people could extend the functionality of the platform using code, which will get executed inside the platform on various events. For example, being able to integrate custom callbacks for page views, extend the UI of the theme using some behind the scenes processing (eg. integrating comments or recommended posts).
• a marketplace for addons where people and companies could sell themes and other addons for the platform. This is a very far fetched thing, and I am still thinking about the complexities involved in it.

Time to get back to work!

We (and by that I mean I) just made DevXBlog available for whoever wants to give it a try. It can be still clunky at times, there are a lot of planned features I will want to implement in the near future (for eg. a new WYSIWYG content editor, kickstart the Addons sections with a simple analytics solution, create a theme development kit and start using it to push new themes).