I just tried it. It's like using a static site generator that deploys as seamlessly as Dropbox syncs. That's nice. That's something I might actually use. But, as I'm sure you've already considered, there's no market for a Dropbox-enabled static site generator. :-(
As for the audience you are targeting, "serious writers who want to focus on writing without the hassle of running a website", I see a couple of problems.
First, it doesn't seem like long-form writers have a problem with any of the current Internet publishing platforms. There are some conventional length restrictions for online content that grew out of the length (and style) of reading that's comfortable to do while sitting at a desk. Adapting those conventions to the era of tablets is indeed a problem, and one that's being addressed by things such as iPad magazine apps, Kindle subscriptions and Instapaper. But that seems to be a different problem than the one you're positing.
Second, and more importantly, anyone who is concerned about the "hassle of running a website" won't understand Markdown (or even know what plain text is, for that matter). The concept of a markup language is a hard one for non-technical people to grasp. There's a reason WYSIWYG editors, for all their problems, are ubiquitous.
Thanks for your input. I'm glad to hear you find it useful.
Our hope is that by having a pretty flexible data storage format (plain text), we can concern ourselves with laying out the content in an optimized manner for any device that might like to access it. By eventually outputting to ePub, responsive HTML/CSS, KF8, we hope to allow writers to write once and let us handle putting it in formats that would make it available everywhere.
Also, 100% agree with you on authors not understanding plain-text and Markdown. These are at the forefront right now because the product is rough enough where the only people that will get it are people that understand these things. To build something your average writer will want to use, we're going to need to provide a soup to nuts experience, but one that respects the content creator and keeps them in control of their content.
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I just tried it. It's like using a static site generator that deploys as seamlessly as Dropbox syncs. That's nice. That's something I might actually use. But, as I'm sure you've already considered, there's no market for a Dropbox-enabled static site generator. :-(
As for the audience you are targeting, "serious writers who want to focus on writing without the hassle of running a website", I see a couple of problems.
First, it doesn't seem like long-form writers have a problem with any of the current Internet publishing platforms. There are some conventional length restrictions for online content that grew out of the length (and style) of reading that's comfortable to do while sitting at a desk. Adapting those conventions to the era of tablets is indeed a problem, and one that's being addressed by things such as iPad magazine apps, Kindle subscriptions and Instapaper. But that seems to be a different problem than the one you're positing.
Second, and more importantly, anyone who is concerned about the "hassle of running a website" won't understand Markdown (or even know what plain text is, for that matter). The concept of a markup language is a hard one for non-technical people to grasp. There's a reason WYSIWYG editors, for all their problems, are ubiquitous.
Thanks for your input. I'm glad to hear you find it useful.
Our hope is that by having a pretty flexible data storage format (plain text), we can concern ourselves with laying out the content in an optimized manner for any device that might like to access it. By eventually outputting to ePub, responsive HTML/CSS, KF8, we hope to allow writers to write once and let us handle putting it in formats that would make it available everywhere.
Also, 100% agree with you on authors not understanding plain-text and Markdown. These are at the forefront right now because the product is rough enough where the only people that will get it are people that understand these things. To build something your average writer will want to use, we're going to need to provide a soup to nuts experience, but one that respects the content creator and keeps them in control of their content.