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comment by m15o
m15o  ·  1406 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Show hubski: midnight.pub

I've paid close attention to the very accurate points you touched upon, and made a good deal of refactoring on the presentation side.

> It's been suggested that the optimal length of a line (which, in our case, is also the width of the entire column) should be somewhere between 50 and 75 characters. Given Eric's observation that, on average, characters in fonts are ~25% wider than its corresponding `0`, and assuming we're aiming for the average of 60 characters per line, consider setting the width of your column to `45ch` and see where it leads you. Remember that it's all in service of readibility, so if it consistently feels off to you, tweak the values until reading is pleasant.

This caught a lot my interest. I have two variations right now:

https://midnight.pub/ (the main one)

https://midnight-79pczempx.vercel.app/ (this one is 45ch)

Would love to get your perspective on which one feels better to read in.

I also wonder if you have some ideas on places I could potentially advertise to, in order to get onboard more people for the alpha and see at a little higher scale what usage could be like.

You have been the greatest help so far on the project, much thanks for your time and expertise!





Hyperseeker  ·  1405 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think it works well with the `45ch` limit. I think what you have now in your regular app works better with articles and such, like Medium or Ghost, where texts could be long.

Of course, I'm not the high authority on these matters; if people tell you that the column is too narrow, do take their voices into consideration: that's how you become better as a developer and a designer.

> I also wonder if you have some ideas on places I could potentially advertise to

I'm not much for a marketer. I just make things.

If I made an app that I wanted to present to the world, I'd look for places where there's demand for what I made. If I make an app that's good for writing long texts, I'd show it to writers, journalists, bloggers, script writers... – anyone who could use such a thing. Seems like a reasonable thing to me: you want those to see it who could engage with it meaningfully.

So my guess is: figure out what kind of an audience you want, and what kind of an audience Midnight's best suited for, and show up there with the app in hand.

For scale, you could advertise to Product Hunt and post it as an alternative to other products.

m15o  ·  1405 days ago  ·  link  ·  

As always, very profound and thought-out comment. Thanks for that! I'm going to keep improving the core parts and UX/UI during the alpha, and learn along the way. :)