Weird v0.4 - Themes & Revisions
Three weeks have passed since our public MVP reveal. We're thrilled to report that all 25 early-bird slots have sold out; thank you! 😍
Nerd-tier Weird will still be available for just $25/yr (half price) during the next several months of our beta period.
One year of service guaranteed
Seeing these purchases trickle in - first by friends and long time supporters, then by brand new people - is a blast. The elation of selling a product we wholeheartedly believe in truly feels like a high worth chasing.
Best of all, having surpassed our first milestone of $250 in revenue means our tiny operation is technically sustainable for the next year in terms of infrastructure costs, i.e. server hosting & domain registrations. We would have kept weird.one running for at least that long at our own expense regardless, but we hope our pioneering customers will appreciate the significance of a self-funded service.
Of course, we'd like to make our time spent developing this thing sustainable as well, so, onwards! We're putting out another release today, with two key features:
muni-townCustom Themes
With our first pass of theming completed, Weird.one is officially a MySpace competitor. (just kidding, sort of)
We partnered with the wonderful hazel cora to demonstrate the capabilities of Weird Themes v1, which is based on Jinja 2 templates. All of her themes are available for free here.
'glass', 'minimal' and 'shell' themes by hazy.sh
This however is just the beginning of a an intricate scheme. The end-game is fully moddable websites, like WordPress but more safely sandboxed.
From zicklag, to the webdev nerds:
So for starters, Phase 1: the most minimal version would be to make a WASM module [for site rendering].
Phase 2 would be to refactor the WASM module as a "WASM component" with a standard API and then use jco to load the WASM component. Eventually WASM components will be the foundation of the plugin system, so we want to get into that early on.
Phase 3: a Vox-like as the static site generator instead of just minijinja, and hook it up so that we can regenerate the site whenever the user profile changes, instead of rendering the page with the WASM module on every hit to the page.
Phase 4: upload a custom WASM component so that you can have your own custom static site generators.
Phase ♾️: run some kind of web applications with plugins almost like Wordpress. The plugins would get access to the user's Leaf subspace, so that it could read and write arbitrary data under the user's account.
Advanced Revisions
Weird aspires to be a digital garden for personal web spaces. That means facilitating small beginnings that can mature over time. A key aspect of this is version-controlled documents, allowing writers to fearlessly work through several iterations of a post.
Until recently there was no easy way to do this well, but now we have the magic of CRDTs 💫 Using the excellent Loro, we've got a functional demo of 'Git for writing' working.
Down the line this has major implications. Among other things, it sets the stage for personal websites that can accept pull requests. Wouldn't it be great to enlist your trusted readership as a collaborative community-editor?
Side-quest: Roomy
A month ago we nudged Peter Wang about an idea zicklag had concocted for p2p chat on AT protocol, the backbone of Bluesky. Peter has generously agreed to sponsor zick and zeu for a month long stint to make an MVP of the group chat app we're calling Roomy.
Roomy UX mockup by zeu
It's a digression, but this explorative development is effectively a prototype companion to Weird Projects, which is what will make Weird an actually social network.
This also gives us an opportunity to get hands-on with Automerge, another CRDT-based framework we want to evaluate for use in Weird.
Follow the development of Roomy via the Bluesky feeds of @zicklag.katharos.group and @zeu.dev
Weird development will continue throughout February, albeit at a slower pace than usual.