What's new in April 2019

There's been quite a bit has been going on behind-the-scenes at Spowtr over the past few months. Visibly, you'll notice an overall fresh look and feel which focuses more on the content, however that's just on the surface. We've also been busy adding many new features for reader and writers.

For writers

A whole new authoring environment has been designed and developed which not only gives you a good sense of how your "spowt" will look when it's published, it also includes the following new features:

• A draft mode with auto-save
• An optional feature image space
• Ability to add YouTube and Vimeo videos
• Strike text from the record, like this.

Add pull quotes for those awesome quotes worth pulling out...

  And you can now include pre-formatted 

  "code blocks" for programming tutorials!

For readers

Aside from improving the overall reading experience with a cleaner look and feel we've also added the ability for readers who join the Spowtr community to add their sentiment to the spowts they read. They'll also get a sense of the community's sentiment, like so:

But that's not all. We've also added the ability to start real conversations by creating responses to spowts. At the end of each spowt, you will notice a "Respond" call to action, like this;

So, whether they agree or disagree, you can have your own, respectful say on the topic and start a real, long-form conversation.

What's old

We also got rid of some old stuff that was taking up space such as excessive links to other content and commenting. These have been removed to not only free up space but because we want to really facilitate long-form conversations. That is, either by letting you focus on what you are reading or get you to write more than a flippant comment if you agree or disagree. Hence the addition of the "Respond" feature which replaces commenting.

You can learn more about why we've changed things on our About Spowtr page or read this piece on purpose driven product features by your truly.

Oh, and of course the odd bug fix and security update as well of course...

Enjoy!

_{- Lorenzo Princi, the one-man-band at Spowtr}