I started writing digitally back in the 00s. Blogs were becoming more and more popular, but it was fairly normal to see a custom-made website, purposefully built just so the author could publish their essays, articles, or blogs post, usually for a relatively small group of readers.
Since then I have used almost every major platform that was meant for publishing; from blogger to WordPress, and from Medium to Ghost and Substack. However, I could never manage to continue publishing in a single platform for an extended period of time.
It didn’t matter if it was a minimalist platform or had a ton of features, or whether it was a free service or I was on a paid plan, or what the genre, topics or the content looked like. It just seemed impossible to keep publishing, whilst my drafts piled up on my local machine.
Recently, I came to the realisation that publishing on the Internet has unwritten rules that are enforced by the publishing platforms. Some of these rules are like the KPIs [1] in the corporate world — How much content did you publish this month? How many returning readers you had this week? How many people came from organic search results? How many opened your email newsletter? What is your DA [2] on this or that topic?
In today’s world, if you are not chasing such numbers you either lack knowledge and competency, or writing is a solitary hobby for you.
There are also another set of unwritten rules that further restrict us. Some of them are format or length specific e.g. Twitter vs Medium. Some others are focused on who the audience is, whilst another platform may be focusing on author more than the reader. There are plenty of options for commercially-minded writers too.
This means, if you want to publish a sentence, you will most likely go to Twitter. On the other hand, you would seldom attempt to write a pseudo-intellectual article on Twitter; that would be more suitable for Medium or Substack, for example.
You also don’t want to have an almost empty outlet that seems abandoned. If you decide to publish to, say, Blogger or WordPress, you most certainly don’t want to publish a single post and wait for another year to publish again. Those posts, in some ways, are perceived to make sense in the context of being related to other posts or the author.
That could be one of the reasons why all publishing platforms — to the best of my knowledge, at least, feature a central theme and settings that applies to all posts with sections such as about the author, topics and categories and a host of other, seemingly related, stuff placed all over the content itself.
It seems the text you write, has no meaning on its own.
Further more, styling a single note distinctly from the rest of your other posts usually require some knowledge of coding and/or a paid plan or a self-hosted CMS [3]. Just another indicator that notes don’t matter much on their own.
Whilst all of this was going through my mind, I also kept asking myself “Why do I write?” — which eventually led to a mindset shift that I will write about soon. The combination of both made me start creating Wiym.
In the beginning I didn’t have a crystal clear vision — or any ideas, for that matter, about what I should build. All I knew was that, for example, if I start a blog, then I have to keep publishing on it, otherwise it will be perceived as a failure; or that I can’t highly style individual notes or publish very unrelated content, all in one place.
So, I decided to start by creating a simple CMS — purely for my own needs, that would allow publishing notes and I thought to myself ‘I will figure the rest as I progress.’
At the end of the first day of coding, I somehow came to realise that the solution was to focus on each individual note. It was about a perspective change away from the mainstream format-, author-, audience- or any other metric-, feature- or platform-centric system.
The note had to be focal point of the new system. That’s all that was missing.
From there, everything started to fall into place very naturally. It’s been around two weeks since I wrote the first line of code for Wiym on the 12th. The platform was almost ready within 5-6 days, but since I had decided to leave the registration open to others, I had to do a little bit of extra work to make sure it is actually usable for less technical people.
Wiym is quite limited at the moment. A lot of it is by design, but there are quite a few things that I will add or improve on in the next few weeks and months to make it both more usable and enjoyable to use.
Until then, hope you enjoy reading what is published on the platform or have fun playing around with the publishing system.
– Mahdi