Necessary, no. Most of the functionality has been around for a while, it's the polishing, redesigns and extra things that took the extra time.
To clarify we have not been in full-time active development for 2 years. I was still a full-time student the first year, so myself and cofounder were only able to work here and there, mostly weekends. This year I became the first full-time employee.
Do bloggers really have this problem? I have more drafts waiting to be finished than I have articles. I have too many ideas to execute them all. Am I alone?
I did an "Ask HN" thread about a year and a half ago and found a good number of people with this problem. Skribit came out of that problem I had myself for my own blog http://paulstamatiou.com
'Cures Writers Block' is the one liner, but having read a lot of blogs that have it installed in the last year - it also helps you tune your writing to your audience. People request followups, or more detail on topics that you've covered, which helps you connect with your readers.
Some bloggers do. I think lots of people have writer's block on occasion. The tool is also a great way to get feedback from visitors on what they want to hear.
It's not so much writers block with me as that I don't necessarily have the best sense of what my writer's want to hear. I write about very technical content, and very between explanations of advanced topics, introductions, and opinion pieces. It's useful to know what my readers want to hear.
Yeah that was a bug i noticed right at the very last minute. Amazon would error if promo was for $0 so I have been working on hacking a fix in - we've never given away free Pro accounts before so we just caught this issue. Ideally should just bypass Amazon completely.
Hit me up with your username and I'll manually bump you up to a year account until we get that resolved.
You can't really it a "bug" so much as "you not bothering to implement what you promised". The issue was entirely predicable, and a workaround would be trivial. When you told techcrunch about the promo, you obviously knew it didn't exist. It's hard to call that anything but a lie.
While I agree that more testing was called for (ie. try your own promo before telling people about it), calling this a lie is way over the top. Being embarrassed in front of the TC crowd is punishment enough. Let's be serious, people: it's not like he was expecting to get rich off charging $1 instead of $0.
I'm guessing he programmed a promo code system into Skribit and didn't test it before giving the code out to TC. I've done stupid shit like that. Does that make me a liar?
In case this wasn't clear, he didn't just "fail to test the code". He consciously put $1, where it was promised to be free. That is, he chose to not deliver what was promised. Not a "bug". Not a "mistake".
Seriously though, it seems wrong to put an .m4v file behind the "What is Skribit?" on the home page. None of my systems can play that. Is that an iTunes file? I don't 'do' iTunes, though I may be alone in that respect.
