I dropped the Dream Platform for Authors spec sheet doc on you at the end of the last post, and I’m sorry, because that is not a quick read. 

But it is thorough, if I do say so myself!

It was created in 2024 out of a sprawling mess of notes I had accumulated over the years of features I want and need in such a platform. It was a wish list but I shared it widely in hopes that someone, somewhere, would pick up the idea and run with it. 

Alas. 

So, two years later and no closer to seeing my dream platform becoming a reality, I decided to build it myself. It was not a decision made lightly, but the development of AI assisted coding made it a possibility. I’m a decent web dev coder, but building apps is outside my purview. I decided, with guardrails, to give it a shot. 

The question, of course, is why bother? I could just set up in a service like WorldAnvil and be done with it. But as I mentioned in the last post, I would be locking myself into their ecosystem… and their subscription model. I would lose a lot of control over how my story rendered for readers, too. Those reasons held me back, but I was tired of being held back. 

In the meantime, I had become a devotee of the Obsidian app for notetaking: free, locally hosted, and using only simple markdown files at its core. The app itself is not open source, but that doesn’t matter, because all your files are in .md format which makes them extremely portable. You can import markdown files into nearly every word processing program out there, including MS Word, Google Docs, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It’s also extremely customizable out of the box, and even moreso with all the community plugins available for it. 

I really love the app and admire how it is distributed, and use it every day. 

Then it hit me: that’s what we need! A free, customizable, and portable app that can build your serialization website for you. 

Enter: Keely App!

I went back to the Dream Platform for Authors spec doc and started whitling it down into a project I might be able to build. The first phase was, obviously, the generator. 

What is the generator? It is the code that takes your markdown files and turns them into a website. I needed to do this first because to design the actual writing/publishing app, I would need to know everything it had to account for. I had a pretty good list, but in building the generator I found out just how many moving pieces there are to that much metadata. 

I kept the writing app to phase two, knowing that would actually be the more complicated part. Phase three will be all the fun stuff: reader engagement, monetization, and building a hosted version for authors who don’t want to mess with the setup to make their story site live. 

The app itself, though? Free forever! The source code will always be available on github for authors with a techy bend to modify and use their own way. The desktop app itself will also be free to download and install, although setting up the website side of things might require some web hosting knowledge and skills. 

The hosted version will be the paid tier, where everything is in the “cloud” and Keely takes care of the backend stuff for you. 

But why was “always free” so important to me? What does it matter that the user files are always in plain markdown? I’ll get to that in the next post!