The marketing on the homepage needs an overhaul. Took me a really long time to understand the product! The automatic code changing at the top was super confusing. Clicking on the demos didn't work. A lot of the demos had locks on them (???), which is weird -- the demos help me understand the product, why would they be locked? More confusing, a lot of the locked demos had been unlocked by sponsors, so clicking on them worked! So why was the lock still there?<p>Also the tag "more than syntax highlighting" is what threw me off. I thought this would be an IDE extension or something that extended syntax highlighting in some cool way. I thought you were just using markdown as an example. Maybe "supercharged markdown code blocks" might be a better tag line.<p>That's probably the biggest thing I see as a production-ready blocker. The feature itself looks cool based on the few demos I saw.
Quite impressive, I didn't get it at first because I thought it was just MDX. Then I saw that there were changes in the video such as "```js focus=2,4[9:30],6", ans I saw that the code in the video was highlighted differently, then I understood the product. It's a way to annotate code more deeply than just with MDX. You need to make that <i>much more explicit</i> IMO, it needs to be quite clear when people read the site. I recommend a site that is more long form and describes the features well.<p>Also get rid of the weird "sponsorship for unlocking documentation" model. Make the library sponsorware if you need to, as in you can't see the code until you sponsor, but why would you make the docs sponsored? They're what might entice people to actually pay to use your software. As someone else said, you're actually crippling your own sponsorships by hiding marketing material behind a paywall. Marketing should be free so that as many people see it as possible, and some subset will buy. If you cut off the top of that funnel, you just get fewer people buying.
I created a syntax highlighting API earlier this year with some of the same features: <a href="https://torchlight.dev" rel="nofollow">https://torchlight.dev</a>.<p>I've got a handful of paying users and a few hundred free. I'm happy to see syntax highlighting being pushed forward!<p>I'll definitely be following along, it's beautiful stuff.
Hi! I'm looking for feedback and ideas before making this production-ready.<p>You can see an early ancestor of this project on this post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536789" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536789</a> from two years ago (which had great feedback!).<p>If you want to try it, beware that current docs are minimal. If you have questions or feedback GitHub Discussions is the best place to post them. Thanks!
Ok, so, real talk (and this isn't meant to be a shallow dismissal -- I'm truly interested in the answer): what can I do with Code Hike that I can't do with Pandoc (possibly with a custom filter or 2)?
As a daily user of Markdown, I was never aware of MDX. Your post helped me understand what it is :)<p>I also like your idea of monetizing by "minimum" sponsors. How do you deal with people not wanting to sponsor because they don't want a monthly commitment but are willing to spend a fixed one-time sponsorship?<p>Also, what tooling do you use to take care of the sponsorships?
Is MDX going to be the only way to use it? I prefer authoring content with WYSIWYG tools (block editors and so on), so would love to be able to use this kind of thing with those.
Everybody is saying that they didn't got it, but then they got it, and I am still wondering what it does. It looks like Markdown to me. So what is it?