I announced Blot on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. Thank you all for helping to get it started. It was a nice surprise to see it posted again here today.
The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven't heard of static site generators
Some people are pointing out that they found it easy to read your pricing before you added this site. I’d like to offer a different perspective. So many tech products and startups lack this sort of easy to find clarity.
Many times in my professional life we’ve dismissed products we might have bought if they had a pricing page as clear as yours. Not so much because they necessarily did anything wrong, but because we rarely have the time to “research” tech products that are “nice” but not “necessary”. So where some companies might have sold us an eternal product license for $5 a month, they didn’t because they didn’t have this sort of pricing page, where they very clearly explain the exact price of their product in as few words as possible. Some may find that ridiculous, but I’m fairly certain that if we do this, then others does as well as we’re very rarely unique.
One of the consequences of having done this professionally at many organisations for two decades is that I also do it as a private person. Maybe that’s even more lazy, but it is what it is.
I want to second this view--simple transparency and being upfront about pricing sets the tone for an entire ongoing relationship, and is even critical to beginning one. I have a 99 percent rejection rate of every website that doesn't put pricing up front, along with a customer service phone number. If I have to click more than once for pricing, and if that phone isn't on the landing page, the entire product goes straight into the ether. Ignoring these basics is a fundamental lack of respect for my time and attention as a customer, and I won't have it. I know this view is pervasive, yet dark patterns persist.
To be fair, it's very clearly fronted on the Sign Up form, which has a prominent button in the top right corner. A dedicated Pricing page/section would be nice simply because people often look for it, but it's not like they're trying to be sneaky or use dark patterns.
Yeah, this is just a usability issue for sure. Unfortunately for me, I didn't want to click "sign up" until after I could locate the pricing, leading me into a catch-22 situation.
Ye "sign up" implies that you have accepted the pricing.
A common dark pattern is that you need to enter PI to get to the pricing so that they can call spam you forever. (I am not accusing the linked site of doing it, I haven't checked.)
Personally it never even occurred to me that the "sign up" button would show pricing - in fact it wasn't even apparent that this was a paid product. Usually services have a separate "pricing" link somewhere at the top that explain things.
I pretty much never click on "sign up" buttons unless i have already been convinced the service is something i want to sign up for.
I think of a "sign up" button as something I click after I've chosen to use that product. The button click signals my intent to do so. Having to click it to see pricing is something that would just not happen for me, because I'd never intend to sign up without seeing pricing.
I agree sign-up is not how I would look for pricing. Sign-up is something I click when I'm ready to commit to using but until then I'm looking for information and I expect something like a Pricing page.
If I can't find the pricing I'm never going to click "sign up"
The interesting question is how did you arrive at this site layout where the pricing is hidden in the sign up page when every single SaaS site on the internet has a pricing link in the header and in the footer. Genuinely curious.
As a HN reader it was a little hard to figure out if this was a static site generator or a dynamic script like those old school php files that turned a folder of images into a image gallery website.
But for your target audience, it might be confusing to compare your service to those.
I'm responsible for hosting the website (I'm not the author of the post). Just wanted to say sorry for the outage. Issue was triggered by an aggressive uptime monitor which was freaking out at some slower-than-usual response times mid-HN-hug. Will tweak the uptime monitor
> Just wanted to say sorry for the outage. Issue was triggered by an aggressive uptime monitor which was freaking out at some slower-than-usual response times mid-HN-hug.
What is the theory behind this? If response times are too slow, how is terminating service supposed to help? Who is it supposed to help?
The timeout for the requests issued by the uptime monitor was set a little too low – the uptime monitor mistakenly believed the service was not responding (it was, but slowly)
True; but it's perhaps worth noting that FontForge can have a fairly steep learning curve. There may be a place for a significantly easier tool for casual users, if it finds a different balance between power/flexibility and simplicity.
I don't know whether Crossfont gets that right - I haven't tried it - but I can imagine the market niche may well exist.
I'm sceptical but more than happy to be wrong. Fonts are surprisingly complicated software and my suspicion is that the market of people who casually want to make them is small.
If someone interested in learning how to make fonts asked me for advice, I'd recommend he invest his time in FOSS software rather than proprietary tools which can (and do) fold and disappear. I've worked through FontForge's Beginners' guide and I'd recommend it to people with even a minor interest in type. You'll learn a lot beyond how to use the software itself:
Personally, I would be interested in editing fonts, though I have little interest in making one from scratch; eg I like the idea of firacode ligatures, but I don’t care for the entire font (and not all of the ligature designs).
I imagine its too little to bother with picking up font forge, but an MS paint of fonts would be justifiable.
More specifically, I probably have a number of one-off usecases where a simple, shitty editor would be ideal; another example is that I like ascii diagram characters but I have yet to find a font that does all of them well. When using something like latex or monodraw, where I’ll eventually render an image of the text, a half-implented font of 12 characters that can only be built as postscript type 1 with an potentially infinitely recursive ligature definition would be exactly what I’m looking for, and a simple font designer probably gets me 90% of the way there
Seconding this. I'm a wannabe hobbyist type designer and I found FontForge to be prohibitively difficult to use. I'm sure it's wonderful once you sink in the many hours needed to learn it but I just want to drag around vectors and try things out. Like you, I don't know for sure if Crossfont hits this sweet spot but I would love it if someone managed to do so.
Other options you might want to consider -- but at a substantially higher price point -- would be Fontographer or Glyphs.app. In my experience they're substantially easier to get to grips with than FontForge. (I believe they both have free demos available, so you could play around a bit before deciding if you want to spend a couple hundred dollars on this hobby.)
I'm not sure if this refers to high DPI support or more general UI improvements. If it's the former, there are some workarounds in the GitHub issues: https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/2155
In general, you are right (excluding the usage of word "Nazi"): private entity can deny services to other entity. However, in legal practice there are exceptions to to the rule, e.g. when the entity which denies is a monopoly (even locally defined), or services are too essential. I'm not in position to decide if it applies to the situation described, but worth keeping in mind that there are limits.
No it does not. The principle of free speech says nothing about who you are forced to do or not do business with. It only affects expression after all.
I do not agree with "Yes it does" (and thus that "Free speech means no one is forced to do business with nazis"), I agree with the rest however (which is basically the same as what dmerfield said).
https://blot.im/news