Introducing Blurb9

December 18th, 2015Dan Yoder

I am happy to present to you our latest experiment Blurb9. Blurb9 is a mashup of Markdown and Embed.ly, and makes it super easy to weave together disparate social media into a coherent narrative. It’s one of those things that’s easiest to understand if you just try it.

It’s also a mashup of a lot of the open source work we’ve been doing. Blurb9 runs on a combination of Fairmont, our functional reactive programming library, Haiku9, which is powered by Fairmont, and PBX, our experimental HTTP API framework. And it’s anonymous, meaning no registration required.

Motivation

Have you ever wanted to share something on Twitter but one-hundred-and-forty characters was just too limiting? Sure, brevity is the soul of wit, but there are times when you need a bit more. I think this is particularly true of technical topics, but it also applies to situations where you want to aggregate a bunch of social media into a narrative.

Of course, you can just write a blog post, which is often what we do. But blog posts are less conversational, less extemporaneous. There is a gap between status updates and blog post. Sites like Tumblr and Storify fill that gap, but they didn’t meet my needs.

In particular, I wanted something that felt light. Something that was quick and easy. Otherwise, I might as well write a blog post, right?

The Solution

I’ve become comfortable writing in Markdown. We write for our blog in Markdown. In fact, I do all my writing in Markdown, with the exception of Twitter updates and email.

Meanwhile, Embed.ly makes it easy to embed content into Web pages. Basically, they provide a normalized interface for embedding across a wide variety of content sources. We can transform ordinary Markdown into a rich content using this interface.

Add in unguessable URLs and you have an anonymous app. No registration required. You can share the URLs with whomever you want. They’re as private as you make them. Full-disclosure: we can see the content on our servers. In the future, we may introduce a way to make them truly private. But for now, you’ll have to take our word for it that we’re not reading your blurbs.

The Result: Blurb9

The result: blurbs! The app came together quickly and is still a beta. It feels like the exactly the right amount of effort required to go beyond a Tweet. Ironically, right after releasing the app, I got into a nuanced technical discussion about React versus Web Components on Twitter. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would have been perfect for a blurb, since you can easily embed Tweets in a blurb. But I haven’t developed the habit of…blurbing? Hm. No. Blurbifying? Writing blurbs. I haven’t developed the habit of writing blurbs instead of Tweeting. Note to self: need a word for writing blurbs. I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know how it goes.