2022-08-02 - Why Flowershow

Building on flowershow-why-scqh and our original diagram

Why Flowershow

In short: Publishing markdown made easy.

And not just any markdown: the super-charged all dancing all singing markdown with everything from math to javascript components.

And not just one markdown document: a whole digital garden.

In a nutshell

• Markdown revolution: markdown has taken off. Ubiquitous, easy to use, good tooling. And not basic markdown: super-charged markdown.
• But publishing is still painful
  • Google "Publish Markdown" and you get a slew of hacks and half-baked solutions https://medium.com/@jumpingkiwi/how-to-publish-markdown-to-medium-a-clean-workflow-a0ab78bdac34
  • Especially if you want "markdown plus" i.e. markdown plus all the things that make markdown really awesome ranging from the basics like tables and footnotes to super-powered end of MDX where we have javascript and web components in markdown.
• We are building a solution to that.
  • Free/open source with self-publish support
  • But with great UX and a business model (cloud paid options so this is sustainable)

SCQH revisited

• The Markdown revolution
  • Ubiquitous
  • Increasingly accessible
  • Broad functionality
  • Standardized
  • Super-powered with javascript via MDX

Balance between standardization and extensibility

• More than markdown.
  • Markdown plus: all the extensions
  • A document is more than text: Markdown on its own is not enough. Even a single document is often more than text: it includes images or other media as well as potentially related data files (for tables) or bibliography files for references.
  • Plus there is publishing documents plural e.g. a website, or even a book.
    • => need a way to publish a set of files together => a micro CMS

The Markdown Revolution

Nearly, twenty years ago I came across markdown.

At the time, for documents I was writing HTML, LaTex or my own bespoke XML format (I was a geek and mathematics student).

I immediately liked markdown's balance of close-to-plain-text human readability and its expressive power.

I've been using markdown ever since.

At the time the toolchain was pretty basic and the documentation was John Gruber's website. But you could tell this format hit a sweet-spot. Over the years, I used a variety of other formats such as ReST or asciidoc and even rolled a few of my own. But I kept coming back to markdown.

What's noticeable over the last decade is that everyone else is starting to use it too. Major platforms like stackoverflow have not only made Markdown the standard amongst coders but brought Markdown to the masses. Markdown is becoming mainstream.¹

Markdown (+ Git) has several hard to replicate killer features

There used to be several severe usability barriers to adoption

But they are going away

Markdown is becoming programmable

In a sense

At the time my default

Appendix

https://www.slant.co/topics/3845/~best-hosted-services-to-render-and-publish-markdown-files-online

• gitbook
• render - more generic
• flatdoc - https://github.com/rstacruz/flatdoc - not updated in 8y
• documentup - https://github.com/jeromegn/DocumentUp 888⭐ not updated in 7y and site http://documentup.com server errors

Recent launch on producthunt https://www.producthunt.com/products/markdit (does not look so good)

There's great documentation stuff like

• https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/
  • But it can't support JS (MDX) see e.g. https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/discussions/3621

Appendix: Beeper inspiration

https://www.beeper.com

And manifesto is great https://blog.beeper.com/p/the-universal-communication-bus-42dfb9a141ad?s=w

We're building the best chat app on Earth

Chat today is broken. We have 5-10+ different chat apps on our phones, each for a different set of contacts. There's no unified inbox or search. Our inbox is cluttered with one-time codes and spam.

So, we're fixing it. Beeper is a universal chat app. It’s a single app to chat with friends on 15 different chat networks. We’ve added chat superpowers that make it the best chat app on earth.

Apple, Facebook and Google control the majority of chat apps right now. For them, chat is just a minor part of their main business. Their chat apps exist primarily to lock people in to their advertising or hardware walled-gardens.

Our approach is different. Chat is our only business. We love chat and are 100% dedicated to making it awesome. Read more of our chat manifesto.