PostOwl

Getting a release out there was really helpful. I've just made a release with a bunch of improvments: https://github.com/PostOwl/postowl/releases/tag/v0.1.1

And a blog post to go with it: https://postowl.com/blog/postowl-011/

If you try PostOwl, do get in touch and let me know what you think!

Yesterday we launched PostOwl as a technical preview.

We posted on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36929830) but didn't get much traction. I'll try again in a few days with a blog post about something specific.

Reddit was quite successful with over 10k views of my posts there on r/sveltejs (https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/15disjv/postowl_inplace_editable_blog_powered_by/) and r/selfhosted (https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/15diu1b/postowl_inplace_editable_blog_powered_by/)

The website has had over 800 unique visitors and over 130 video views. But I've only had 10 people sign up for the email newsletter so it looks like there's an opportunity to make that more enticing!

We got the basics of PostOwl working pretty quickly, but we wanted to refine the user interface before sharing with the world. This polishing stage has taken a few weeks while we watched friends and family use the app and discussed ways to make it easier to use.

At every stage we aimed to make it simpler. Less is better. (See Good Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#"Good_design"_principles)

We're proud of the result, PostOwl has as little as possible in the UI to get in your way.

The first launch is a technical preview for people who are comfortable with self-hosting. We've written detailed steps for installing for free on fly.io and tested with volunteers to make sure it works.

Now we're ready to let technical early-adopters try it out. We'll be posting on this site, Hacker News and Reddit (selfhosted, sveltejs and SQLite). Let us know if you think there are other places we should post!

In a few weeks we plan to have a hosted SaaS version. Watch this space!

I'm quite technical (I've developed web apps and worked in customer support at CircleCI, GitLab and Algolia) but I'm not a JavaScript wizard. To make PostOwl how I wanted it to be I needed help.

I've been following Michael Aufreiter's work for about ten years (nearly as long as I've been thinking about PostOwl)! He's spent a lot of that time working on editing interfaces for the web (take a read of https://letsken.com/michael/how-to-implement-a-web-based-rich-text-editor-in-2023). In March 2023 he launched https://editable.website/ - this is what I'd been dreaming of!

I emailed Michael and we started working together to create PostOwl. It's been a great partnership and I can highly recommend working with him.

I like writing:

• blog posts
• journal / diary
• letters to friends and family

These three types of writing are spread over different apps. I wanted them all in one place. PostOwl is the solution.

It needed to be Open Source so that people will trust it.

It needed to be for the long term. All your data is in a SQLite database so it's easy to back up and since SQLite is a long term archival format I can be confident that people will be able to read it in the future even if the app around it stops working. I can leave a single file with all my writing after I die - a bit like how we used to find a perons's diaries, letters and books in the attic.

PostOwl needed to be easy to edit. No confusing admin panel or build steps like for a static site generator. Using SvelteKit, ProseMirror and SQLite we've made PostOwl instantly editable in-place on the page - see the video on the home page for what it's like.