A few years back, I ran a small e-commerce shop selling vintage clothes sourced from warehouses across Europe. The store was powered by Shopify, which made management easy - however, I struggled with writing blog content for SEO through the built-in editor which felt too small and didn't allow me to format my posts as I wanted.
Back then, I thought about building an internal tool, a custom editor that would allow me to write exactly how I wanted and then push posts directly to Shopify via their admin API.
I eventually had to close the store though, and nothing further happened with my idea. That is, until today.
The vision
Despite eventually closing my store and shelving my editor idea, I kept bumping into similar problems when I had to write. I realized that much of our writing remains scattered across various in-app editors that often prioritize functionality over the experience of writing itself. I wanted a centralized workspace that offered auto-save, clean formatting, and the ability to create custom blocks, all without the friction of copy-pasting into different platforms.
This led to Lydie, a tool designed to separate the act of creation from the mechanics of publishing, allowing the focus to remain entirely on the craft.
Design and performance
Being both a designer and full-stack developer, I've put a lot of emphasis on building Lydie with performance and sleekness in mind - something that's reflected both in the visual interface as well as the technical implementation of the platform (I've shared a more technical looktechnologies of Lydie in this post).
In addition to this, I've also built Lydie to scratch some more technical-oriented itches of mine - particularly that I've never found an easily pluggable platform that would allow me to write and serve my documents in a headless way - a things I've needed numerous times for lightweight blogs for my side projects.
Lydie comes with a built-in REST API that makes it possible to fetch the contents of a workspace - either as plain HTML or in a JSON format that makes it possible to format the content exactly as pleased - with support for custom components ala. MDX.
Project status
Lydie is currently in closed beta and remains under active development as I refine the core experience. If you are interested in using the platform for your own writing, you can sign up for the waitlist on the official website. I'll also be sharing the progress on my Twitter.
I'm incredibly excited to soon reveal the curtains of this passion project!
- Lars