Story Publishing Platform
The gist: build an application that allows writers to publish their stories online.
As a writer of all sorts of words, from short stories to novels to poems, I'd love an open platform and community for sharing my stories online. This is also a great project for learning because it's got similar needs to a blogging platform but a bit more complex.
I also think a community-supported, ad-free, open-source platform for something like this could thrive!
I call this idea StoryHub.
Mock-Ups
Specs
Even if the accounts are the same, I think there are two distinct use cases here. One for the writer who publishes stories. And one for the reader experience.
Writer
- Create books
- Title
- Description
- Add chapters to a story (and edit and delete)
- Title
- Body of Markdown
Reader
- Read stories
- Navigate between chapters
Thoughts on Tech
I really think this project would benefit from being driven by an API and being built with the idea of supporting multiple clients. Reading on a mobile device with an app is a great experience. As can reading on the web. I'd build this with a GraphQL API.
Because the UI needs are ultimately pretty simple (centered around rendering long-form text), it could also be a good project for experimenting with tools like React Native, Ionic, etc.
Extra Credit
- Image upload for a book
- User photos
- Support additional metadata for a story (tags could be nice, license too)
- Reorder chapters
- Generate RSS feeds for a given book and author
- Easily export epub and PDF versions of stories
- Reader account feeds
- Follow stories and/or authors
- Feed of new chapters for followed stories
- Mobile apps for reading (and even authoring)
- Tipping support or Patreon integration
Concepts
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Content authoring and publishing
- Content-driven UI