Two long years has passed after the previous big Telescope release. What years those were! Today we’re happy and proud to present the new Telescope — it’s better, even more lightweight and even simpler than before.
And yes, we’ve completely rewritten all the codebase and made it easier to scale and extend it. In addition, we made it easier for us to develop new features, and we also prepared the codebase for the release of something pretty cool coming later this year. But well, let’s start from the most important bits:
All-New Editor and tons of new features
One of the complaints we kept hearing is that our Telescope Editor (https://editor.telescope.ac) became quite complicated over those years. We’ve completely rewritten it and also made it much simpler. We eliminated all the childish bugs we had and added a bunch of new features such as extra SEO options (now not just for individual articles but for blogs as well!), customizable footers, search, and many more. In addition, the new editor can now work in dark mode as well, which leads to some better typing experience after the sunset (if your operating system supports this and if the dark mode is enabled in your OS settings).
We’ve also improved the support of mobile devices and reduced the size of the JS bundle. The breadcrumbs were finally fixed, the HTTP operations work better than before, and everything looks more polished and ”serious.”
More customization options. Many more!
Customization has always been one of the major advantages of Telescope Pro (now called Premium). Of course, we extended it further — we made layouts customizable, we finally added pagination (do you know there was literally no pagination before? 🙈) and made it possible to search for articles within your blog. You can change a bunch of settings now — you can even customize how many articles are displayed on your main page and how these specific articles are going to look.
And, of course, you can also add custom CSS and change literally anything.
In addition, all Premium users can now also remove Telescope branding. More updates are coming: we want your blogs to be 100% customizable, and we also want you to be able to change all smaller details such as logos and icons.
Marketing plan
Telescope never did any marketing. But now it’s time.
In the upcoming weeks we plan to work on smaller but important things — adding some proper service pages, updating the privacy policy, fixing stuff and polishing the landing page. We had some very specific ideas of how to approach marketing this time, and that’s becoming one of the most important things for us now.
We also plan to re-launch Telescope on Product Hunt in just a couple of days. In 2019, we got #2 Product of the Day, who knows what will happen now?
Telescope Own
One of the goals of Telescope is to enable you to own your data. We believe that all the information should belong to those who created this information, and we find it crucial in the age of information to be the platform that makes this possible. That’s the reason why Telescope allows you to download the archive of all your posts in a second, and that’s why we don‘t show ads and don’t bloat users with spam and messages like “You liked this post, maybe you want to read this one as well?”
Our focus is and will always be on the content itself.
But we wish to expand it further. We will present “Telescope Own” later this year — it is the special version of Telescope to be installed on your own server. Yes, the data will be truly yours — nothing about you will be stored on our centralized server. The details of it will come later, but what’s important for now is that all the changes to Telescope itself were made with this idea in mind.
What’s next?
The last two years were chaotic for most of us. But helped us realize the need in Telescope and helped to figure out how to make it more useful and exciting. Telescope 3.0 is the huge step in this direction.
However, not the last and not the only one. We plan to continue with smaller updates, and we want you to let us know what’s important to you! Just follow us on Twitter or write an e-mail to hi@telescope.ac.