Review our startup: Instantly create a blog theme that matches your website

Went through the demo. Here is my advice:<p>1. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.<p>2. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.<p>3. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr, and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for these platforms.<p>Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? (<i>"Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?"</i>) Trust me, you don't<p>Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make their blog look good.<p>My $0.02

I, on the other hand, thought the site as quite snappy. My biggest confusion was that I was trying to add multiple sections to be replaced on the first step, rather than delete it later. I would really suggest trying out the "remove the part you don't want" before adding what you do. In my eyes, I always see what I want to remove before what I want to add/change.

I'd think hard about who your customer is. At most companies, there's a designer either on staff or on retainer that worries about these sorts of things and I'm not sure they are likely to spring for your services. Similarly, the vast majority of small businesses won't see a need for a blog, or they will already have a templates version built into the platform they are already using (i.e. shopify, etc.) I agree that theming blogs can be a hassle, but I'm not sure the market you've chosen is big enough to make a go of it. Some of the other commenters have some interesting ideas about how to address the needs of a larger market, but even then, the intersection might be too small. I'd think really hard about whether or not this is worth investing in - not saying it is or isn't, but just that its worth spending some time getting very comfortable with the answer to that question.

Hey everyone, I'm one of the founders. We started Blogic to cure the headache of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform such as WordPress. It was a huge pain with my last startup, and inspired me enough to solve it. Please email sean [at] blogic [dot] com with any suggestions or feedback.

Bug: Using the iPad, it capitalizes the first letter of the word so <a href="http://skimthat.com" rel="nofollow">http://skimthat.com</a> turns into Http://skimthat.com. Your system doesn't see the lowercase <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> it's expecting and adds the prefix again causing the invalid url <a href="http://Http://skimthat.com" rel="nofollow">http://Http://skimthat.com</a><p>Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do the <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> check or ignore case with regex.

Wow! This is great. I wish I knew about your just 3 days ago when our developer spent a few hours creating our custom blog :) I am still thinking of switching to this because of the automated Twitter, Facebook and Google+ add ons. Very impressed!<p>One feedback is that when I was customizing the blog theme, I was not able to see how the sidebar would look in the blog. As a result, I went through the entire process first time around and then went back to revert the 'add sidebar'.

I don't want your blog platform. I want my Blogger blog (yes, Blogger) to match my website, even if it's not perfect, without spending 3 hours pulling my hair out. That, I would pay for.<p>By the way, I'm just getting a spinny right now, so I can't comment furhter. Will try again after the HN effect is gone.

This is really awesome, and helps bootstrapping blogs for startups. What I would personally pay for is: the same functionality, but in the end, give me an option to export as a Wordpress/Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger theme. That would be kick-ass.

My first impression was "wow, slow site load." Maybe add a few more servers before posting to HN ;)<p>EDIT2 - The site is responding a LOT faster now, it must have been a one-time issue.<p>When trying to replace the content of my site (beeets.com) in Chrome 14 I get<p>www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js:6 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'stringify'<p>so I'm not able to review the product<p>- EDIT (error from Firefox 7, more or less the same)-<p>Error: JSON.stringify is not a function Source File: <a href="https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js" rel="nofollow">https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js</a> Line: 6

Absolutely fantastic. All that's needed is to be able to export to Wordpress or Posterous. Other than that, this solves a <i>huge</i> problem of mine!<p>Great work on taking on such a problem.

What would be awesome is something like this for e-mail.

Thank you everyone for the quality feedback and bug finding :)<p>To address the most common feedback, we have decided to create a theme generator for WordPress and are in the midst of development. Other platforms will likely follow. We actually decided this a couple weeks ago, so it's reassuring to hear this.<p>If you'd like to be notified when the WP generator is ready, shoot me an email: sean [at] blogic [dot] com

I couldn't get this to work with any website I tried. It just sits on the "Loading… This shouldn’t take long." screen.<p>Can someone suggest a url to try?

It's weird that I need to refresh after I added a sidebar. And I don't get to choose the sidebar. So if I designate the content area, but want the sidebar in another area of the web page, this is not possible.

Nice idea - I think you could use a bit of tweaking regarding elements you can select, for example I don't think anyone wants blog posts in divs smaller than 100x100px

I would think that many websites these days start with a blogging platform for a combination product presentation / blog. At least we did. ;-)

Buggy.<p>It also pops up a nag dialog when you try to close it, which is a crucifixion offense in my books.

The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site, but with little Like buttons all over. I am not enamored. I'm sure others will find it useful, though.

Lose every pop-up box announcing "OMG YOU'RE LEAVING THE PAGE! ARE YOU SURE?! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE! YOU MAY LOSE YOUR DATA! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE!"<p>I had to kill the browser session and selectively choose which tabs to restore.<p>We get it - you found javascript.<p>The site concept is great, but presentation is annoying.