This post was first published on seed.town, which I’ve since shut down. seed.town was meant to be an easy way to build content sites.
Related: I bought seed.town and Creating friedrice.fun, my non-professional fun blog.
I thought rich text was the most sensible option for a few reasons:
- It’s easy for everyone to use, no need to teach anyone, technical or not
- “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG), this is important for a “website builder”
- Rails makes this very easy with action text and Lexxy
But there are a few reasons why markdown is better:
- Easier to own your data, import, export, move to another platform
- Zero learning curve for technical users
- Easy to work offline
- Easy to work with AI agents
And there are reasons why markdown is not great:
- Difficulty for non-technical users
- Not a great editing experience on mobile
So I was pretty set on rich text. My thinking was that if I have a markdown editor, it will be difficult to attract non-technical users. So my only audience would be technical users, who might already know how to build a website easily, so seed.town is less useful for them. I went with it, and it was great. Lexxy handles pretty much everything you need: images, embedding custom content, WYSIWYG, etc.
But now what about editing your site locally? I realized, this probably is an important feature. Exporting your content in a usable format and editing your site locally. That’s a little bit difficult with rich text, especially with Lexxy and action text. One option is to make a desktop application, but I don’t want to focus too much on something that isn’t the core product.
So I decided to go with markdown. I’m building a Seed CLI too which will allow local editing of your pages, media, and backing up too. I’ll be honest, I never really enjoyed the authoring experience of markdown, but Obsidian makes it infinitely better. And since everything is just markdown files, I can use Obsidian locally!