Draft Announcements: Job Board, Draft Sites, Editor Flow, and more.
Hello! Here’s another round of some cool new things in Draft:
- The Draft Job Board
- Draft Sites
- Editor Flow
- Import public urls
- Autocomplete names
- PDF exports
- Count selected text
The Draft Job Board #
Two of the proudest moments of my life were helping a couple friends find new jobs. Work is obviously important to us, and to be a tiny part of helping people with that process was incredibly rewarding. I want that to continue.
So today I’m launching the Draft Job Board.
It’s simple. If you are looking for a great writer or editor, the community using Draft is full of them and the job board would be a great place to connect. If you’re a writer/editor looking for work, I’m really hoping this is a handy resource.
One problem I have when using job boards to post jobs is the upfront cost of the post. It might cost me $400 to post a job on a developer job board, but even if I don’t find any qualified candidates, I’m still out $400.
So for the Draft Job Board, I wanted to innovate on the pricing model a little. To post a job, it’s only $5. And only if you actually find someone (on the honor system), I’ll ask you to pay an additional $10. That way you save most of your money if you don’t end up finding a candidate.
Draft Sites #
I’ve been making websites for over 15 years, and there’s still too much friction creating a simple site and keeping it updated. That’s a reason I haven’t kept Draft’s Features page updated. And for the Job Board, I didn’t want to create a full-blown application yet, until I figured out what people needed from it.
So I created Draft Sites. With Draft Sites, you can host a Draft folder as its very own website. Just hit publish in one of your folders:
Pick your own subdomain and Draft will host your folder as its own site. Name a file “Index” (or move it to the top of your documents in that folder) and that’s the document people will see going to your subdomain. The other documents in that folder each get their own permalink you can use.
The sites have a simple, clean theme. Check out the Job Board and the new Features page to see what they look like by default.
You can add your own CSS if you want to get fancier. To override styles I’ve defined, add your styles to a document named “override.css” in that folder. If you want to start your styles from scratch and have full control, name the file “main.css” instead.
This is a great way to use Draft as a super simple CMS and get a site up quickly.
Editor Flow #
Since I started Draft, the most common question has been: I’ve imported someone else’s document into Draft (they don’t use Draft, yet), I’ve made changes, how do I send them to Draft to show them what I’ve changed?
You couldn’t. You had to tell the document owner to signup for Draft, import their doc themselves, and send you the share link. Not anymore.
You can now import someone’s document (or copy and paste it into Draft), make changes, then send your colleague a different type of share link:
When you send this link, they’ll immediately get a view to accept or reject the changes you made.
For example, there’s plenty of people looking for feedback on their writing at Reddit. There was someone writing a neat essay about how as an adult they still write letters to Santa. I thought they could lead a bit differently. And it’s much easier to show what I mean than just leave a comment. See some changes I experimented with: here.
Import public urls #
The import menu now lets you import any publicly accessible url that has an article on it. It’s like Instapaper for writing.
This is handy if a friend sends you a URL of something to edit that’s already hosted on their blog or a place like Medium.
Autocomplete names #
Search Engine Optimization shouldn’t be ignored if you are writing online.
When you’re naming a Draft document, you’ll now see an Autocomplete checkbox to have Draft provide popular search terms matching the title you start typing. For example:
When I know I’m writing something that might fit a common Google search, this feature is helpful for creating a title to get extra traffic from searches.
PDF Exports #
Use the Export menu to now export your Draft document as a PDF file.
Count selected text #
You can select text and now see the word/character count of just that selection.
Milestones #
Draft is about to pass 150,000 documents! Thank you, everyone, for depending on this project I started just to help get feedback from my wife - she’s a ridiculously great supporter of mine, and tomorrow I will be lucky to have been married to her for 11 years! :)
As always, if you have anything I can help you with, Twitter is a great place to reach me:
https://twitter.com/natekontny
Or the official Draft Twitter account: