Hey @kmwallio, I can help clear up some questions about brand use. Feel free to email privately with any copy questions you have, but otherwise I think it’d be helpful for us to share this information publicly.
As far as WriteFreely and Write.as, there’s an important distinction:
- WriteFreely is the open source, self-hosted software
- Write.as is our hosted service which is running WriteFreely – it’s one of many that people can choose from
If you’re familiar with other blogging platforms, WriteFreely is the equivalent of WordPress .org or Ghost, and Write.as is similar to WordPress.com or Ghost(Pro).
So if you’re building a generic library that supports the WriteFreely API and works with any WF site (not just Write.as), we recommend that you use the WriteFreely name, rather than Write.as. For example, our official Go library only connects to Write.as, so we’ve named it “go-writeas.” However, our official Swift library works with any WF instance, so it’s named “writefreely-swift.”
Today, we highly recommend that developers build WriteFreely libraries, tools, and apps, so they’re more widely useful to more people (not just users on Write.as). That helps keep the ecosystem open, and avoids centralizing tools around our one particular WriteFreely service.
Finally, some notes on WriteFreely branding:
- While the name is stylized as “write freely” in some places, the official name is WriteFreely, with the same capitalization and no spaces.
- You can find the official WriteFreely logo here: png / svg
As far as usage, we mostly don’t want developers to imply that their tools are the “official” ones created by us. This is not only to protect our brand, but also to make sure we don’t get support requests for software we didn’t create, etc.
In your case, you did a great job mentioning that your Vala library is “unofficial,” and your documentation makes it clear that ThiefMD simply integrates with WriteFreely – so you have nothing to worry about there. Also, since this is clearly an integration and not specifically a “WriteFreely app” (which might confuse people), you can use the official logo in your app to indicate this fact.
Like I mentioned, please feel free to run anything else by us, if you have other questions. And thanks for asking about it in the first place!
P.S. We’d be more than happy to link to / promote your Vala library and ThiefMD once they’re ready, if you’d like!
