The week was quite intense, and, as always, I’ve prepared a couple of new platform updates. For example, you’ve probably noticed the breadcrumbs and improved navigation in Telescope Editor, as well as some better styles here and there. You’ve also probably noticed that the creation of a new story was buggy and didn’t always work as expected yesterday and the day before.
I want to apologize for that — sometimes shit happens. This time it was caused by the development of another important feature I want to introduce you today. It’s called Topics.
What’s this?
The number of users of the platform is always increasing. However, there is no way for you to know that. Most of the content that was created on Telescope lives on its own, and there is no way to find it if you don’t know the direct link.
But some people want their content to be discoverable. That’s why, since this week, you’ve got an option to specify up to three topics per publication. You can also specify a default set of topics for your blog or project.
Of course, you can also skip this step if you don’t want to, and continue using Telescope the way you did it before.
What is it for?
As I said, the idea of Topics is to make your content discoverable. At this moment, you can only specify topics, but you cannot see what’s inside of them.
The situation will change in the future — and the landing page of Telescope will be transformed into a beautiful catalog that will allow you to find some good content. And it won’t be limited to only that! There will be an option to subscribe to a topic and search for something specific within the platform.
What’s next?
There won’t be any other big features introduced in October, except for some improvements to statistics. What’s more important now is to make sure everything is stable and easy to use. The plan is to launch a marketing campaign in December, and there are a lot of things I need to do for that. For example, it would be nice to have a documentation for any non-trivial things like shortcuts or limited Markdown support (do you even know that you can create headings using Markdown?).
Telescope was promoted only once — when I released it on ProductHunt. However, I cannot even say that it was a real promotion. Of course, the platform got several users and even some customers, but I certainly want more. Telescope is very resource-efficient and scalable, and it would be stupid not to use these characteristics for good :)