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Update #6: Connections and Analytics

It's been nearly 3 months since the last update.

I took a six week vacation from mid November until the end of 2020 during which I did my best to stay away from work.

Since the new year, I've had a renewed energy to keep working on Swish, some new features have been shipped.
Also there is now a Blog for Swish. It was somewhat ironic that a blogging platform did not have a blog 😂.

What's New?

Connections to other platforms

When I first started thinking about this feature, it was primarily about cross posting to other platforms. However, I see that it can be so much more.

In the dashboard, there is now an "integrations" menu item which allows you to connect your blog with multiple services.
Right now, the focus is on cross posting, so the initial connections are Medium, DEV and Hashnode.

Multiple connections of each type can be added, and they can be set up to cross post and even edit/delete the external post where possible.

In the future, other forms of connections will be added. Some possiblities I'm currently thinking about are:

  • Comment hosting services to enable comments on blog posts
  • Social media platforms to notify followers when a post is published
  • Newsletter platforms to share new posts as newsletters
  • Webhooks for more generic integrations
  • Other generic connecting platforms like Zapier and IFTTT.

Analytics

Analytics are now being measured on all blogs. The integration was done with the amazing Simple Analytics. It is privacy friendly, and we don't track your users or use any cookies.
This also means that there is no need for cookie banners and your readers have an uninterrupted experience.

Displaying these analytics on the dashboard is being worked on and should ship in the coming week.

Social share buttons

Social share buttons are now shown when a single post is being viewed.

This in currently ONLY available on desktop, because:

  • Mobile browsers all have in-built share buttons
  • We don't want to clutter the view, especially on smaller screens.

If you would like them to also be displayed on mobile screens, let us know.

Global Content After Posts

In the customise menu, you can add some content that will be show blow every post.
We can see this being useful to add some extra information about the blog or author, or add a newsletter subscription link like we are doing on the Official Swish Blog.

What's Next?

Show analytics data in dashboard

To round up the other end of the analytics and display this information to the users.

Import/Export

This may take some time to implement completely.
The idea is to make it possible to import posts from other platforms like Medium, Ghost, WordPress, DEV, Hashnode with only a few clicks.

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