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Cover image for Project Benatar: Publishing DEV-powered websites with Stackbit

Project Benatar: Publishing DEV-powered websites with Stackbit

ohadpr on June 19, 2019

Hi, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Stackbit. We're working on making it easy for developers to build modern websites in minutes. With all the recent...
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Andrew Wooldridge • Edited

You should talk to sites like Netlify, and Repl.it as well. If you want this to become an ecosystem, you want to be inclusive, and likely federated in some way.

Also reach out to write.as/about which offers a really compelling alternative to medium blog posting, which also offers image hosting via snap.as and posts to Mastodon. They are doing great work in this area.

I should be able to do anything from write a one off message and have it go to Mastodon, Twitter, etc. and write up a longer form message which could be a blog post that goes to sites like Dev.to, and then write even longer tutorials that post to sites like teachable.com/ and scrimba.com/ ... Perhaps I write up a CodePen snippet, or a Repl.it project, or a mini site through Glitch. These should flow through the system as well.

And say I want to roll up all my posts and make a book out of it. I should be able to connect to leanpub.com and auto publish to Gumroad and Amazon.

Think bigger than just blogs.

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Ben Halpern

Yeah, I think this ends up being a question of finding the right tools for the job, having them be accessible and easy to use, and supporting open source.

We have friends at Glitch and Repl.it and CodePen and are already starting to integrate in different concepts. Finding ways to collaborate in super aligned ways is not always the simplest thing to pull off but I think we're pretty aligned with the essence of what you're describing.

This was one interesting thing we've done and we would like to integrate more. The endgame is unclear, but we don't want to try and create sprawling universal tools that try to do everything.

Blogging is an extensible concept, and we definitely want to ultimately doing more exciting things on top of it.

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Andrew Wooldridge • Edited

Yes, taking the attitude of the early web where things were loosely connected is a good one. Having feeds that can be consumed. Web hooks. PubSub hooks, and rest / graphql apis would be another route to making bridges to other domains. I can write code in github and Netlify auto pushes a new site out via Hugo. I could see writing a blog post in Github/Gitlab and having it auto push to Dev.to , etc.

Good luck! The fate of the internet is in your hands. Free us from the social network black holes :)

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Moneer

Love this project. My question though: how is Stackbit making money?

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ohadpr

Stackbit is a young (7 month old) startup that currently only offers free products. It is not uncommon for startups to seek product market fit prior to beginning monetization which is usually done by releasing free products that are thin on features. Monetization usually follows later on by charging for things like advanced features, enterprise-grade capabilities, etc.

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Moneer

Awesome. Well I have been using it and it has been pretty amazing. I am excited to see more themes and more features. You guys are doing wonderful work. So excited about this. Best of luck!

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Sharone Zitzman

This looks awesome! Way to go Stackbit and DEV teams! 💥