Show HN: Linen – Make your Slack community Google-searchable Hi HN! Kam here. I’m the founder of Linen.dev https://linen.dev , a website that makes your public Slack community Google searchable. Linen will sync your Slack threads and make it SEO friendly so your community can find Slack content that was previously hidden. Previously I worked on a popular open source project which had a sizable Slack community. Slack was great for engaging with community members and with early sales. However as community scales Slack becomes this black hole where context becomes lost. Most public communities can’t afford to pay for several hundred/thousand members so they are limited to 10,000 free messages. You run into the problem of people asking repeat questions and not searching in Slack. It also doesn’t help that the Slack UX encourages posting and not searching. We experimented with Github discussions and Discourse but didn’t want another channel to maintain and split the community on. With Linen I wanted to build a tool that is very low maintenance without changing my current workflow. By making it search engine friendly and putting it on a website the community members can find answers to repeat questions before ever getting into your Slack channel. Linen is the first result that comes up on Google if you search for “seeing a weird issue with flyte” https://ift.tt/q3dNS8l... or “replace beast http with proxygen” https://ift.tt/9hdYeu6... . As a side effect of syncing conversation to a website you end up with a very long tail of unique and relevant content for your community. Linen is free to use and get setup but I offer a paid version (I am still figuring out the pricing model for it) where you can get the content redirected to your own subdomain where your domain gets all the SEO benefits. Linen is built with Nextjs, Node, Typescript, React, Prisma for the ORM and using AWS aurora for the Postgres db. I chose Nextjs for the server side rendering capabilities and wanted to share types between client side with Typescript. I’ve also enjoyed working with Prisma as the ORM since you don’t have to write a lot of boilerplate with other ORMs. I've also been pretty happy with Vercel and Nextjs especially with the server side rendering and client side caching it provides. Here are a few communities on Linen right now: https://ift.tt/i5UDWm8 https://ift.tt/5TNdAIH https://ift.tt/vMtImUT https://ift.tt/gp0lomw https://ift.tt/gFdNQAV https://ift.tt/UmWlTXw The product is very simple right now but I want to add features like related questions detection with semantic similarity, integrating with Github to notify the thread when it is finished, auto thread detection for conversations that aren’t in thread form. You can sign up for free today at https://www.linen.dev . I am doing manual onboarding at the moment to get better feedback and to manually walkthrough some of the less polished parts of the boarding flow. p.s. I’m actively working on supporting Discord on Linen so would love to hear from anyone that is interested April 26, 2022 at 09:40PM
Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
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