⚡️ [Alpha Preview] Launch your developer blog using hashnode.dev

Hello Hashnoders! I hope you are having a great day. We have been working on something exciting for the last couple of weeks and it's time to show an early preview to the whole community and take feedback.

Stories are an important part of Hashnode. I have read, bookmarked and enjoyed hundreds of stories since the inception. In one of our casual team discussions, we noticed that there are so many smart folks hanging out here and are publishing stories. Visit anyone's story tab and you will realize that it's almost like a personal blog inside Hashnode. Fazle and I started Hashnode with one simple goal which is empowering developers to share their knowledge and grow. Hence, we built a cool new product called hashnode.dev using which anyone can launch a personal developer blog out of their Hashnode profile in seconds.

Here are some of the highlights:

• You can unlock your personal blog which lives at username.hashnode.dev. It lists all your articles from Hashnode.
• You can bring your own domain too. Just point your CNAME to our host and you are good to go. We also provision SSL for free!
• We have stripped away Hashnode's branding so that it's fully personal and yours.
• The blogs are fully customizable. We are adding more options soon.
• You retain all the rights to your content. Download a copy in JSON format anytime.
• Your blog is deeply integrated with Hashnode. If you publish something on your blog, it's automatically pushed to Hashnode feed so that you already have an audience before you even think of promoting your articles.
• Anyone with a Hashnode account can react to your articles, participate in discussions and so on.

We are offering all these for free. For a full list of features, check out hashnode.dev.

For those of you who love live demos, check out my own blog which is powered by Hashnode. Not impressed with the default settings? Here is another one.

Why are we doing this?

We are big fans of empowering developers to share and learn from others. We think it's your right to personalize your content and showcase them on a setting which reflects your personality. Medium used to offer free subdomains and CNAME (paid), but they have stopped it now. Furthermore, most of the good articles are now behind paywalls with no tangible gain for publishers that are trying to remain independent. We think we can make a difference in the lives of developers through this approach. Therefore, we have started this initiative to help every developer blog freely while still retaining independence and full control of their data.

What does this mean to us?

We are not deviating from our initial goal of building a friendly and inclusive community for developers. If anything, you will now see more stories being published in varieties of topics. Our job will be surfacing the best discussions and stories for you to read.

How do we make money from this?

We have several ideas for monetization, but it'll be premature to implement them right now. For instance, we can introduce a revenue sharing model similar to YouTube at some point in future. However, we'll gather feedback from authors like you before introducing anything. For now the focus is on acquiring a healthy audience base.

How can you help?

This is the most important part. Since this is in alpha preview right now, we are giving access to only a selected few. So, if you are interested in starting your own developer blog, we would love to give you early access, get your feedback and make this rock solid before making it public.

Did you know we have canonical URL support on Hashnode? This means if you already have a blog, you can republish some of your content here and play around with the tool without hurting the SEO of your original website. If you like it, maybe you can consider porting your blog fully to hashnode.dev and take advantage of our user base.

So, would you be interested? Please comment/DM and I'll get back as soon as I can. You can also click "Request early access" on hashnode.dev and fill out a short form to get access.