A simple and powerful new way to write and reach the Prototypr audience. Introducing our brand new editor:

I’m actually using the new editor to write this very update and love it so far! Here’s a few features I find useful as I’m writing this:

🤍 Distraction-free: The focus is on the words
💾 Autosave: peace of mind, that my work is being autosaved
👁 Preview: Check how it looks before publishing
🎭 Code view: Jump into the code to add custom HTML and CSS

In this post, I’ll share a bit on the growth of the platform and the new publishing process.

The Growth of Open Stories

At the end of May, we started the new Open Stories section to publish free articles (those outside of our paywalled publication). There wasn’t much of a plan, other than doing our bit to keep the web open and give writers another option. Since then though, the stories section really rocketed, surpassing Toolbox as the most popular part of the site:

Through our organic traffic and newsletters, a single story can reach 1000s of readers. Here’s some page view counts, and bear in mind that this is just starting out:

How the reach works

There’s always an element of luck to the reach an article can get. It can depend on the topic, whether it’s picked up by other newsletters, or even if it’s shared a lot on social media. But here’s what the site brings:

Newsletters: Every week I send the top stories out in our weekly newsletter to ~20k subscribers, and Sophie sends her picks in a fortnightly newsletter called ‘By Design.’ (here’s an example).
Search: Prototypr is an authority domain name (👀), so gets decent organic reach on search engines too.
Inbuilt Audience: Prototypr publication has been running for around 5 years now, so there’s a great existing audience.

So far, these factors work well, but it’ll all go a step further soon. I’ll be adding a follower/following system, so that you can subscribe to individual writers and be notified when they publish… but that’s another story!

How to publish, and becoming a verified author

With the new editor, a review process has been introduced:

The first post you publish will be reviewed. Usually that will happen within 24 hours during the work week.
Once your post is reviewed and published, you’ll receive an email notification to let you know it’s live.
⭐️ For trustworthy writers, your account will be given a verified status, so you can publish without the review process going forward.

This verification process has been added to keep the quality of content to a good standard, and reduce the amount of spam submitted.

What’s next?

This is a first version, so if you notice any issues, please get in touch. There’s also a few features still to come such as custom embeds (e.g. for codepen or code sandbox). For now though, you have full control of the HTML/CSS using the code view toggle, so could paste in your own embeds directly.