First impressions from Write.as

Hello everyone,

I’m Kristi, a UI and brand designer based in Tirana, member of Collective68, a Tirana based open source consultancy company. This is my first time here.

I am highly interested in [free] open source software and are contributors in some FLOSS communities. I’ve been in touch with Write.as since two months ago, and as far as I’m experimenting with it, I like it’s blog host. In my opinion Write.as is quite a solid open source alternative to Medium. I love the clean theme, minimalistic text and the possibility of writing anonymously with no log-in (something like telegra.ph).

In the begging, it was so confusing the markdown writing and howto.write.as was not easily findable. Luckily, I’m geeky enough to understand this kind of syntax, but it ain’t easy to describe it to my friends. I look strange to them.

Anyway, I’m really into Write.as, and I’m suggesting it to any writer I know. Also, we are offering Write.as ( as PaaS) for everyone who is looking for an independent blogging platform. For more, you can read an article I recently wrote about the importance of self-hosting and open source blogging platforms.

Looking forward to your comments and feedback,

Bests,

Kristi

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Welcome to the write.as community. I think your article nicely captured many of the appealing features of write.as.

When I started with write.as, I already knew some of the basics of markdown from github and other markdown based services. But if you know html/CSS, you can also use much inline html /CSS syntax in write.as posts, such as the <span> tag with CSS styles, and other tags such as <a>, <img>, <details>, <p> etc. One html tag that doesn’t work is <div>.

On the Pro plan, you can create custom CSS and javascript code for each separate blog instance.

Besides the how to, there is also the Write.as guide.

Matt and the other developers here, as well as many of the users, have been very helpful in answering questions, as you see in these forum posts.

Looking at your Collective68 website, I really liked the statement in the footer of the home page: “Made with love for open source culture.”

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