I Want To Read More is a service that helps bloggers make their blog more interesting and engaging by letting readers vote for topics they want to read more about.
I Want To Read More is easy to start with. We provide you a short HTML snippet that you put in your text to create vote icons. You don't need any external content - no images, CSS or JavaScript have to be loaded. You are in full control!
We are building this service in the open. All code is open-sourced on GitHub. Our statistics are publicly available. We share the thought process behind technical and business decisions in our blog. We also want to help others learn from us, so we create a detailed tutorial how we build every feature and why we use a particular technology.
We don't collect any data about your readers, except their votes. We don't store cookies so you don't need to put an ugly cookie banner. We don't log IP addresses. We don't sell your or your readers' data. I Want To Read More is a paid service, so our incentives are aligned.
Because we are building I Want To Read More in the open, we will be sharing as much as possible about our journey in building a SaaS.
Website - the service is hosted on iwanttoreadmore.com.
Source code - all of the source is available in this Github repository. It is split in website and api containing the frontend and backend code respectively.
Deployment - the static website is deployed on Netlify, while the backend API on AWS using the Serverless framework. You will find all required configuration files in the repository.
Web analytics - we use Plausible to track the visits on the website. The dashboard is public: https://plausible.io/iwanttoreadmore.com.
First prototpe - I wrote more about coming up with the idea and building the first prototype in Building a product in the open: open source, open metrics, open development..
More details are coming soon...
If you have any ffedback feel free to contact me on Twitter or per e-mail on <firstname>.<lastnage>@gmail.com.
This service was built using some awesome free ressources, which made everything much easier. Thanks you for sharing your work!
- Photos - Unsplash
- Tooltips - Cooltipz by Jack Domleo