[HN Gopher] Show HN: Singlelink - an open-source micro-site plat...
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       Show HN: Singlelink - an open-source micro-site platform
        
       Author : drewboyle
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2021-03-09 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (singlelink.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (singlelink.co)
        
       | san_dimitri wrote:
       | How is this completely different from about.me pages? Can someone
       | explain the difference between the two?
        
         | Cenk wrote:
         | It's more similar to Linktree - basically a link you put in
         | your social media profile, and then from there you link to
         | other things. A bit like boook.link (but that's only for books)
        
           | san_dimitri wrote:
           | I see. Now it makes more sense. Thanks for the other links. I
           | never knew about boook.link, it seems to be a very fun idea.
        
         | jimbisenius wrote:
         | Howdy Sam!
         | 
         | About.me is a similar tool, but they're not open-source. This
         | means you can't self-host your page for free if you wish, fork
         | & make changes to the codebase if you want to add a new
         | feature, or verify that the code handles your information how
         | you would expect.
         | 
         | To us, this means about.me is a tool you can build with,
         | whereas Singlelink is a platform you can build on top of.
         | 
         | Let me know if I can clarify any more, I hope this helps! :)
        
       | sneak wrote:
       | It's a little bit misleading to list "limited advertisements" as
       | a green check-mark feature of the free plan.
       | 
       | Not only does it put a bad taste in my mouth (it looks like
       | you're trying to obscure the fact that free has ads), a quick
       | scan of the pricing page doesn't illuminate why I'd want to pay
       | $8/mo for the next tier (which would remove the ads, I take it?).
       | 
       | It's also unclear if free supports using your own domain or not.
       | The pricing page should probably make it a lot plainer that you
       | pay to get a custom domain and no ads if that's indeed the case.
       | 
       | EDIT: The singlel.ink domain is a nice domain hack but the period
       | breaks it in a weird place and I bet you're going to run into
       | issues with it confusing people and them putting the dot in the
       | wrong place.
        
         | jimbisenius wrote:
         | Thanks for the taking the time to look through our website,
         | appreciate the feedback!
         | 
         | We're sorry to hear you've got a bad taste in your mouth from
         | our pricing page, I'll have to rethink how we present this. By
         | "limited advertisement", we generally mean less than the
         | competitors (no forced watermark at the bottom of your site),
         | but there's no examples to demonstrate that. You make valid
         | points about how we can better present our features to
         | interested users - and we certainly don't want to hide
         | anything.
         | 
         | At this time, we plan to keep custom domains free and charge on
         | a per-profile basis, however we might end up having different
         | tiers of custom domain support (one might be simpler than the
         | other to setup).
         | 
         | Additionally, I will add that we've made all the features
         | available in our paid tiers available free in our Github for
         | those that decide to self-host. Our eventual goal is for the
         | community marketplace (when monetized) to generate enough
         | revenue to reduce paywalls on features and limit monetization
         | mainly to marketplace purchases, but we'll see what traction we
         | can get. In retrospect, I could emphasize these more on the
         | website.
         | 
         | I hope I made myself clear! Again, I really appreciate the
         | feedback, and we'll keep these in mind as we make changes of
         | the next week! :)
        
       | CertifiGroup wrote:
       | Awesome I need one!
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | benatkin wrote:
       | I dig the name, it reminds me of singletrack mountain biking,
       | which is one of the funnest things I've done.
        
       | jimbisenius wrote:
       | Howdy everyone!
       | 
       | I'm Jim, co-founder of Singlelink. We're a three man team based
       | in Raleigh, NC that loves open-source software.
       | 
       | Our goal is to bridge the gap between micro-sites and websites by
       | creating an open-source micro-site platform with the ease of
       | tools like Linktree and the plugins/themes & extensibility of
       | WordPress.
       | 
       | It's still in beta while we're ironing out bugs and adding
       | plugins & monetization, but we hope you can find it useful.
       | 
       | Please, let us know your thoughts! We love feedback :)
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | What separates Singlelink from other CMS platforms? Why should
         | I use it if you'll impose "limited advertising" on my
         | microsite?
        
           | jimbisenius wrote:
           | In regards to "limited advertising" (an optional watermark on
           | your site, and a "Singlelink" watermark in your SEO title),
           | we only add this for our "cloud-hosted" customers that use
           | our free tier.
           | 
           | Just like WordPress & wordpress.com, you can self-host
           | Singlelink with a platform like DigitalOcean or AWS to get
           | instant access to our paid features! (singlelink.co is 100%
           | open-source at the moment, and the only thing we plan to
           | close-source is billing)
           | 
           | I hope I answered your question! Appreciate the comment :)
        
         | panic wrote:
         | This is a cool idea -- giving people a way to grow their site
         | from a list of links to something more complex makes a lot of
         | sense. That said, and I know criticisms like this are a bit of
         | a cliche at this point on HN, but why does a static list of
         | links need to download 18MB of JavaScript, show a progress bar,
         | and modify the scrolling behavior of the page? I assume at some
         | point in the future this JS will be useful for adding more
         | advanced features to people's sites, but it might be worth
         | paring it down to just what's actually necessary for the kind
         | of page it is.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | pm wrote:
         | What exactly is a "micro-site"?
        
           | jimbisenius wrote:
           | Thanks for the question!
           | 
           | In general, it's a small website built to complement an
           | existing website/set of websites. Traditionally, these have
           | been used for Instagram/Twitter profiles to fit more than the
           | one allotted link in a bio, but our users use them for a so
           | much more! (ex: internal team bookmarks archive, simple
           | product page/checkouts, adding a paywall to a small
           | page/item, or simply using them as their website for ease of
           | use)
           | 
           | Hope I explained myself well! :)
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-09 23:01 UTC)