Last week, we announced that we have been working on rebranding Hashnode and we’re happy to announce that the public beta is now live for you to play around and report bugs.
So, What has Changed?
Hashnode is in the business of empowering developers to create personal blogs easily, share knowledge, and grow their careers. Over the years, developers have practiced the act of sharing knowledge through personal blogging and other kinds of technical content creation. However, they still have to struggle with the process of building a blog from scratch, building their personal brand, improving SEO alongside gaining reach and readership.
Traditionally, websites like Devto, Hackernoon, and Medium, have helped developers gain the reach and readership while sharing knowledge but not total independence over their content. With this, you don’t have authority over your SEO and your personal brand is not prominent on your blog/ content.
The new Hashnode is solving both issues by empowering developers to own blogs on their personal domain for free without sacrificing their readership, reach, and total independence of their content.
Our logo has also been revamped to a modern and simpler look to portray our new mission and goals effectively.
A New Improved and Faster UI
We have modified almost every component and feature from the ground up. This UI also brings a ton of new features and widgets to make your experience on Hashnode better. I will highlight the most prominent ones in this article.
New In-feed Stats Widget
The new in-feed stats widget gives you a glimpse of your blog’s performance. It displays the count of page views per day/week, the total number of posts you write in a week, and the number of likes or appreciations your posts received from the community.
With this widget in place, you don’t have to rely on opening your personal analytics software like Google Analytics every time.
Blogs you Follow
Once you start using Hashnode actively, you’ll end up following a lot of interesting blogs. This widget helps you showcase all the blogs you follow and keeps the most recent ones on the top. In the near future, we’ll help you reorganize blogs on this widget and personalize it further.
New and Noteworthy Blogs
This widget highlights all the new and interesting blogs you should follow. This list is currently curated by our team.
New Explore Tab
The explore tab is a new addition to Hashnode that helps you browse featured blogs based on various categories like General, JavaScript, CSS, Accessibility, Typescript, Mobile Development, etc. Moving forward, we’ll add more categories like Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain to this section. This tab will help all the Hashnode powered blogs to gain additional readership and followers.
Updated Dark Mode
As developers, we all love the dark mode. Hashnode has had a dark mode for a long time now and with this new update, we’ve made the contrast ratio better so Hashnode is easier to read and use at night.
View Changer
The view changer has been one of the most requested features on Hashnode. This new feature allows you to switch between Modern, Classic, and Compact views. Based on what you chose, the postcard design layout changes in all the feeds on Hashnode.
Feed Sorter
The new feed sorter helps you filter user feeds based on the kind of content you want to read. We currently have three feeds sort options:
- The Best tab uses our personalization algorithm to display stories from your already selected interests.
- The New tab displays stories that have been posted recently.
- The Top tab shows the recent and the best stories on Hashnode.
Other Changes
- An improved homepage for non-logged-in users.
- Access to feeds for non-logged-in users
- An improved user onboarding experience.
- An upgraded personalization algorithm for the user feed.
- Improved search.
- An improved story page design.
List of Upcoming Features
- New themes for blogs on Hashnode.
- An upgrade to our newsletter service.
- Better blog dashboard user interface.
- A complete Hashnode PWA user interface.
- Custom CSS support for blogs.
- A points system to reward users for writing consistently.
- A dedicated feature(s) and bug(s) request page.
- A dedicated changelog section with a “subscription” option.
- Support for site link search schema.
- Product help documentation.
What’s next?
- 30th June: Hashnode officially comes out of public beta.
- 30th June: Live Stream Launch Party (To be announced soon). We’ll distribute goodies and free giveaways during the event. Make sure you don’t miss it.
- 30th June: Product Hunt Launch (PS: we’ll need your support there ;))