I saw https://write.as/ on the top of Hacker News this morning.. this leads me to believe that others are also getting tired of blog platforms that they don’t really control.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.omarish.com/u2tjirzb61pigcsncds70cp3jwjf

The apps section caught my eye, and inspired an idea:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.omarish.com/45568tsxj7fkg2w8x4u4n2unk8bz

This is cool, but what if I wanted to use one of these apps so that I could publish a blog post on here? Presumably I’d need the source code and I’d have to swap out the write.as API client with one for this site.

But if we really think about it, why do we do this? Not all technical complexity is necessary. What if we agreed on a simple specification for blog admin sites. Then, anybody who builds a blogging app could choose to implement that spec, and then, for free they get to plug into the entire app ecosystem.

You could configure: HOST (example admin.omarish.com), PREFIX (/api/v1), and then the rest is a simple standard.

• See all blog posts: GET /posts/
• Publish a new post POST /posts/
• Update a post: PUT /posts/<post_id>/

We’d have to decide on some conventions. Is it called post or an entry? Is the post itself content or body? Mimetypes/etc. But with these, we could have a really simple spec for blogging software. We could implement these types using typescript/protobufs/your favorite typed language, so it’d be a little bit easier to create new writing software.

Does this exist? Let me know if you’re interested in building this.

Mandatory disclosure when proposing a new standard:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.omarish.com/czthjaic6vbhde9l1tovk8gtw04q