Enter scriptogr.am, a lovely blogging platform that allows bloggers to write posts in plain text files, using human-friendly Markdown syntax, and publish them directly from a Dropbox account. My content is always backed up, and it's always mine. Joy!
Always nice to read things like this. The power of scriptogr.am is all there, described in two (three maybe) sentences.
Also:
Most blogging platforms are miserable for technical bloggers. Formatting code-heavy posts on WordPress and Tumblr is maddening.
I spent a while considering scriptogr.am. It looks lovely but - while I’m not that bothered about my content - it’s a little too free for me right now. Start charging!
Yesterday morning, whilst drinking my morning coffee, a friend of mine sent me the following tweet. This post is about what I read. I want all of you to enjoy really shitty journalism and research at one of the most respected tech news blogs around, Mashable.
Funny thing is that Reform Revolution, a blog focusing on design and curated by 20+ people, has been online since 2007. The last design update was made in 2008.
Reform Revolution currently uses my own Wordpress, "Grid-A-Licious". I originally created this theme for Reform Revolution and had no plans to let it go public, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy it (and also started creating their own jQuery plugins and Wordpress themes very, very similar to mine), so I decided to give it away for free (for personal use only). Here is what I posted on December 19, 2008:
A christmas present from us at Suprb
Grid-A-Licious™ is a Wordpress Theme made by Suprb. Divs are placed in chronological order with a special grid. Grid-A-Licious uses the jQuery javascript framework which can be downloaded from www.jquery.com. This layout can be seen at sites such as Reform & Revolution (www.reformrevolution.com) and TypeNeu (www.typeneu.com). It seems like there are plenty of people that really like the layout and made their own.
We decided to release this into the wild, so we created a theme, based on the same design you’ve seen before — for Wordpress."
Speaking of grid layouts and Pinterest. Did I tell you I created an image (or media) bookmarking service in February 2009? The name of the service was "Dropular". Oh, and have a look at the design and grid, seen this before?
Basically, Dropular was based on the same idea as Pinterest. Bookmark and collect your favorite images. Tag them and share with your friends and followers. Funny huh? Someone made a review of Dropular on Youtube:
Unfortunately, Dropular is no more. I decided to let it go and is currently trying to focus on something new rather than competing with other image bookmarking services.
I’m a really big fan of Pinterest and love the product. Don’t take me wrong. This post is only pointed to Sarah Kessler and Brian Anthony Hernandez at Mashable for not doing their homework and instead lying to the world.
Last and not least, I would like to credit Space Collective on being one of the first to bring this kind of grid layout to our attention.
Also would like to give a shout out to David DeSandro for creating the extraordinary jQuery Masonry plugin back in 2009 (?)
Please share this with everyone you think should read this.
Update
I’ve sent this tweet to Sarah, but she has ignored it.
Update 2
Check the Mashable comments above. Sarah claims that Pinterest launched in November 2009. Fine. But, check the link she posted. http://web.ar……20081205….com/. She actually posts a link that is one year wrong and still says that Reform Revolution is a rip off?
If she just checked any of the other web archived links here, hum… let’s say… this that was archived in 20090103, it would not have been so embarrassing. Darn.
To her, Pinterest launched in November 2009. So, the above link clearly says that Reform Revolution was 11 (or more even if you check the web archive links) months before the big launch of Pinterest.
Update 3
Still not a word from Sarah or Brian (or anyone at Mashable) about this. But, happy to read that there are people discussion the subject:
Also, I got interviewed by "Rapport", a news programme from the Swedish television broadcaster "Sveriges Television (SVT)" Svt.se.
Update 4
Here is a screenshot of the thread What websites look somewhat similar to Pinterest's design? that is going on at Qoura. Justin Edmund, product designer at Pinterest says "Reform Revolution has been around for a very long time (I subscribed to their RSS in 2008 or 2009 probably) and I don’t think that qualifies as a clone."
So, apparently Pinterest agrees with me.
Update 5
Finally heard back from Sarah. She apologizes for the mistake and adds "UPDATE: The site Reform and Revolution was posted online before Pinterest. Mashable regrets this error." to the Mashable article.
Let’s move forward and talk about the amazing piece of technology I stumbled upon. It’s called Scriptogram and it will turn you into a blogger in no time! It links up with your dropbox that you use and whenever you make a drop it will make a post on your blog that it automatically creates for you! Maybe your dropbox will turn you into the next Blog King, who knows, try it out and see what happens.
It sure has been a great (but some how hectic) start of the new year. In this post, I'll try to summarize why I developed scriptogr.am and the response the project has gained so far.
To start with, in late November 2011 I tried to find a decent platform for me to showcase and express my daily brain activity. I wanted a simple writing tool. After a couple of days of research, I found quite a few online services, tools and open source projects that were more or less easy to use and to understand, but also challenging because the majority of them fell on poor UI design or not customizable at all. I didn't want to limit myself with picking any of them, so I collected what I thought were the best features and built my own service; scriptogr.am.
scriptogr.am is not social.scriptogr.am is not automatic.scriptogr.am is not limited.
Not social
Many of the online blogging platforms out there are based on followers and who to follow. They’re used as an inspirational resource where you expect to get things to look at, things to read, and things to rate.
With scriptogr.am you’re not able to re-blog, follow someone (except the RSS feeds), nor get a phat number of followers.
Not automatic
Posts are not published automatically. When you’re satisfied with your post, you have to manually go to the scriptogr.am admin panel and hit the big "Synchronize" button for your posts to be displayed on the blog. I believe that this makes every piece of publication on scriptogr.am more thoughtful than on other blogging platforms.
Not limited
Use your favorite text editor. Use your favorite device. You own your written words and you control when to publish or remove a post and they’re also backed up in the beautiful cloud, thanks to Dropbox.
Working with scriptogr.am is dead simple because it’s based on the Dropbox API and not limited to it’s own infrastructure. For instance, Dropbox keeps a one-month history of your work and any changes can be undone, and files can be undeleted.
What is the response?
scriptogr.am is young, very young. It has been public since January 1st 2012. Now, 24 days later there are 4.051 blogs up and running, 8,262 blog posts, 182,363 page views and a total of 37,550 unique visitors. This is of course thanks to all the great publicity around the net.
…among many more articles, tweets, G+ and Facebook broadcasts.
Today, scriptogr.am is under heavy development and thanks to everyone’s feedback, the project is getting stronger and better every day. Even though I do everything myself.
Thank you for using scriptogr.am. While we’re still in early beta development, we think you’ll enjoy the app. It’s designed to be fast, simple and to get the most creativity out of you.
scriptogr.am uses Markdown, a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus.
Getting started
After connecting your Dropbox account to scriptogr.am, some necessary files and folders are added to your Dropbox at Apps/scriptogram. First the GET_STARTED.txt text file that pretty much explains the exact same as what you’re reading now. Next, we’ve added a posts folder. This is where you add your blog post (& page) files. These files are plain textfiles, but needs to be saved with the .md (markdown) extension like this: yourfile.md
Please use standard, non foreign filenames. Dropbox sometimes have problem syncing filenames that contains invalid HTML characters.
We’ve added a post example page (this file) there for you to get familiar with.
The template data
All files needs to contain "front block". The front block must be the first thing in the file and takes the form of:
---
Date: 2012-04-17
Title: My first post
---
Between the triple-dashed lines, you can set any of the predefined variables (see below for a reference). But, the Title is required. Without the title, the system will fail.
Predefined global variables
All the variable names below are case-sensitive:
Required:
Title
The title of your post (or page)
Not required, but close to:
Date
The following date format is the correct one to use: 2011-12-31 12:31 or 2011-12-31.
(The Date variable can be used to ensure correct sorting of posts.)
Optional:
Published
Set to ’false’ if you don’t want a post to show up when the site is generated.
Type
Set to ’page’ if you wan’t the post to act as a ’page’ instead of a ’post’.
Slug
Custom permalink (replaces the auto generated url based on the "Title:" variable), especially useful if titles tend to be long or they change frequently. E.g ’my-custom-permalink-url’
Link
Links the "post" or "page" title to an external source. E.g ’http://google.com’
Tags
Add tags to your posts and pages. Comma separated words. Once added, scriptogr.am will transform all tags to valid basic HTML characters.
A page is a similar as a post, but generates a link visible in the menu on your site that will lean to a page permalink.
Publishing your posts
This is simple. Just head to your admin panel and hit the ”Synchronize” button. When logged in to scriptogr.am and visiting your own page, you’ll see the scriptogr.am logotype symbol on the top right of the browser window. This is the link that leads to your admin panel.
Published vs unpublished
Total count of published and unpublished posts (& pages) are visible next to the ”Synchronize” button. ”Unpublished” means that you either removed a post text file from your Dropbox or that something went wrong while trying to sync your Dropbox with scriptogr.am. Also, if you’ve set a post to be published with the Published: false variable.
Finally, happy posting. If you have any questions, suggestions or thoughts just drop us an e-mail at any time.
An excerpt is a relatively small sample passage from a longer work, such as a book or article. ↩
