[HN Gopher] Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook
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Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook
Author : azhenley
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-11-10 13:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (paperwebsite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paperwebsite.com)
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'm not trying to shallowly dismiss this, but it's frankly pretty
| shallow. It's just OCR as a service: blog posts, but you don't
| have to type, and you have to write really carefully so it
| doesn't accidentally make you look illiterate. I believe that
| even the people to whom this appeals will quickly become
| disenchanted.
| cwales95 wrote:
| That was my feeling too. Calling it "magic" might be stretching
| things just a bit.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Only 100 available. Get yours before its gone.
|
| That's unexpected. Is there any context?
|
| Edit: looks like this is for a discounted $8.25/month plan; the
| regular plan is $10/month.
| 094459 wrote:
| I love this idea. Could open up blogging to whole new audience s
| kej wrote:
| If you like the idea of writing on paper and then doing digital
| things with it, I have been really pleased with the RocketBook
| line of reusable notebooks. They don't do the automatic blog
| hosting like this, but there's also no recurring fee. Just a
| simple notebook, a simple phone app, and files that show up in my
| Google Drive (or DropBox or email or wherever).
|
| (No relation beyond happy repeat customer)
| paxys wrote:
| Neat, although I was hoping the "paper" aspect of it would be
| emphasized more in some way, especially for the reader. This is
| essentially a hosted blog, and every OS/platform/keyboard app
| already supports OCR.
|
| > Start for the price of a coffee ($8.25/mo)
|
| It's funny watching the inflation in the price of a cup of coffee
| in tech marketing vs the real world.
| pfundstein wrote:
| This must be a starbucks "coffee" for that price.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| A Starbucks coffee is like $5 Canadian and I find even that
| to be ridiculous.
| paxys wrote:
| The largest size of the fanciest coffee you can get (mocha
| chocolate frappucino whatever) is still like $5.50 in the
| middle of San Francisco, and I'm sure cheaper elsewhere. A
| regular Starbucks roast is 2 bucks, actually on the cheaper
| side compared to other coffee shops.
| eigengrau5150 wrote:
| Pretty sure anybody with a modicum of skill with HTML and the
| patience to do their own transcription can do this themselves and
| host it on Netlify.
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| This is pretty neat. The generated blogs are minimalist (in the
| good sense); They're easy to look at and read. The HTML it
| generates is not bad either.
|
| If I had a concern it would be this part:
| Although it's very good, there can be instances where it makes
| mistakes. If you find that your handwriting is often being picked
| up incorrectly, here are some tips to reduce errors: *
| Make sure you are using a high quality camera to capture an image
| of your page. You can upload files of up to 5mb. * Try to
| make your handwriting as large and neat as you can. * Keep
| line spacing consistent throughout your writing. It can help to
| use a ruled notebook. * Ensure each line starts from the
| same left-hand position of your page.
|
| I think this kind of product being successful relies too heavily
| on It Just Works for it to have these caveats. Personally, I
| can't write like above; My writing is all over the place.
|
| Also this from the app description: NOTE: You
| must have a Paper Website account before using this app.
|
| I feel like you should be able to do everything from the app.
| Install it, create an account, choose your domain name, and start
| posting.
|
| Still, cool product, I hope it goes well. I'm sure there are
| people out there that this would remove a major hurdle for.
|
| And well done for building something from scratch by yourself!
| zellyn wrote:
| > I feel like you should be able to do everything from the app.
| Install it, create an account, choose your domain name, and
| start posting.
|
| They would have to pay Apple 30% of the subscriptions.
| tsuujin wrote:
| 15% until they're making more than $1m/year.
| paxys wrote:
| Stripe is under 3%, and at scale the prices go down rather
| than up.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Actually 30% for the first year of a subcription and 15%
| for any subsequent years of that subscription when it comes
| to auto-renewing subscriptions.
| tinyprojects wrote:
| Hey! I'm the creator of Paper Website. This is the seventh tiny
| project I've built over the past 18 months - I've been
| documenting the whole process on my blog:
| https://tinyprojects.dev
|
| I built Paper Website because I wanted a quick and easy way to
| start a daily blog. I get distracted when I write on my laptop,
| but I love writing using pen and paper - so I set out to build
| this.
|
| I'm obviously very biased, but there's something about writing
| blog posts using pen and paper that is extremely fun and
| liberating. It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered
| thoughts onto the internet straight from my pen - it reminds me
| of all the unfocused blogs of the good old days.
|
| I'm also weirdly very consistent at writing now - I've been
| posting for 40 days straight using this method (here's my daily
| blog: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev). It's not for everyone, but
| I love it.
|
| Thanks for submitting this - if you have any questions I'm happy
| to answer them!
| voldemort1968 wrote:
| I want to like ideas like this but it's been done before and
| rarely gains traction for most users.
|
| We've seen this with smart notebooks that let you write with
| either a smart pen or a smart pad and immediately digitize and
| OCR. We also already have most of this today on our phones via
| built-in text scanning with OCR and the ability to easily copy
| and paste into any blogging application of your choosing.
|
| I don't know if there's really enough efficiencies to be gained
| here, especially any that overcome the lock in required to use
| this product.
| rexreed wrote:
| How much of the AI is really automated, NLP AI and how much of it
| is human-augmented Amazon Mechanical Turk-level Human as an AI
| (Augmented Intelligence or Pseudo-AI)?
| heurisko wrote:
| The video autoplayed for me, with sound.
|
| I'm sure the website is good, but that is super obnoxious to me.
|
| Edit: using a phone, so maybe it was a button press that
| activated sound.
| bogwog wrote:
| I thought all browsers blocked that stuff nowadays. Which
| browser are you using?
|
| On my phone it autoplayed, but muted.
| heurisko wrote:
| Firefox on Android.
| superkuh wrote:
| I'm not trying to complain about how the website is implemented,
| but, all I get is a blank gray screen no matter how many JS
| domains I whitelist. The only functional bit is the 3rd party
| 'crisp' chat thing in the lower right.
|
| I think for most people the best option is running a static
| webserver, forwarding the port, and then copying .html and media
| files into folders in ~/www/ (or whatever).
| danShumway wrote:
| This is just an off-the-cuff guess, but I wonder if you're
| ironically not blocking _enough_ Javascript?
|
| The page loads for me as long as I allow 1st party scripts. I
| don't have XHR turned on for the site. Iframes obviously don't
| work, but everything else seems functional: navigation,
| controls. I don't see a chat option anywhere, I guess I'm
| blocking that.
|
| Just purely a guess, may not be the real issue, and you may
| already be doing that anyway. But I've run into websites where
| it feels like half of their JS exists to break the other half,
| and when I reduce down to only 1st-party, everything suddenly
| starts working better.
| [deleted]
| vgel wrote:
| Hmm, it's an interesting idea. I feel like the finished websites
| are sort of _bland_ though. I wonder if leaning into a more messy
| / paperlike aesthetic would make the product feel more fun, since
| to me I feel like wanting to make a website from paper (rather
| than, say, googledocwebsite.com) is a choice someone would make
| if they really love paper and notebooks and that sort of
| aesthetic.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| I wonder if it could be possible to preserve the picture of the
| paper, with the OCR'd text selectable and positioned on the
| paper, a la PDF.
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(page generated 2021-11-11 23:00 UTC)