April was an amazing month here at Hashnode! We just launched Hashnode Pro, which offers premium AI assistance features for faster writing with keyboard shortcuts, an AI chatbot to help you research and write, and auto-optimized titles and tags.
Oh, and Hashnode’s existing publishing features remain free — so you can continue to publish all the tech blogs and newsletters you want at no charge.
Keep reading to discover all the Pro features, AI improvements, and bug fixes we shipped this month.
The launch of Hashnode Pro 🚀
Hashnode Pro is our new premium tier, with a range of features designed to help improve your writing, as well as enhance your experience engaging with our community of millions of people in tech.
For starters, we’ve developed a suite of versatile AI-powered features to help authors tap into their creativity, and improve their publishing workflow.
Here are all the AI-powered features you can take advantage of right away:
✓ Write faster with the slash key. Summon our AI with a keyboard shortcut to quickly generate an outline, a code block, or a summary of your writing.
✓ Polish sentences and paragraphs easily. Turn a paragraph into a single sentence or bullet points, adjust the tone of voice, expand or summarize your text, or rephrase it for clarity.
✓ Auto-optimize your titles for SEO. Automatically generate an SEO-optimized title for your post, and choose from a range of options to complement your writing.
✓ Craft posts easily with our AI chatbot. Converse with our contextually aware chatbot to sharpen your opening paragraph, pick a more descriptive adjective, or write a strong conclusion.
✓ Boost your SEO with auto-filled tags. Boost your posts’ visibility in search results with relevant meta titles and meta descriptions, generated instantly.
✓ Add alt text to images without typing. Add alt text to images in your post with a single click; this improves accessibility for readers with vision impairments, and helps boost SEO too.
Write like a pro with our AI chatbot: 🤖
✓ Contextually aware: get follow-up questions to perfect your post
✓ Limitless capabilities: sharpen your writing, research, and craft tweet threads with ease
✓ Unlimited AI responses
✓ Tailored for non-native English writers
Our AI features are available with Hashnode Pro subscriptions. You can try Hashnode AI features for
free
for three days here.
As a Pro Hashnode user, you can also: 💁♀️
- Write without distractions using the new Focus Mode in the editor
- Remove Hashnode branding from your blog and add your publication logo
- Get a Pro badge on your Hashnode profile
- Chat with fellow Pro users (and us) in an exclusive Discord channel
- Get priority support (and talk with real people)
More features, like access to beta features, publishing from GitHub and backing up your drafts to GitHub, are coming soon!
Read more about Hashnode Pro here.
Hashnode Pro costs just $7/month or $70/year.
Hashnode remains free
The existing Hashnode features
remain free
. We want to assure you that none of the existing Hashnode features have been converted into premium features, with the exception of ‘Source from GitHub,’ which was predominantly used by teams and companies. However, all existing users of the ‘Source from GitHub’ feature will continue to enjoy free access to it forever.AI improvements
After launching all these AI and Pro features earlier this month, our team continued polishing them after release. Here are all the latest updates:
- "Ask AI" is now the first button in the inline text toolbar that pops up when you select text.
- You can now preview, regenerate, and accept AI generations when paraphrasing.
- We now have "Improve writing" and "Fix grammar and spelling" as the top two items in the list of paraphrasing options.
- We removed "Optimize for SEO" as it was producing the same results as normal rewriting, and didn’t serve our authors well.
- We optimized the prompts to produce even better results for the selected text.
Toggling focus mode improvements
As you’re crafting your draft you may or may not want your sidebar open, and you may or may not use Focus mode. We’ve now improved the functionality of toggling Focus mode in relation to the sidebar.
Removing hashtags from Twitter share content
Did you notice that when you share directly from Hashnode your articles to Twitter, you no longer have the tags included in the auto-generated text for your tweet?
We used to automatically include category tags as hashtags in the tweet text. However, having multiple hashtags in the same tweet can cause Twitter’s algorithm to penalize your tweet, lower your reach, and make the tweet appear spammy. So we removed them and improved the UX.
Bug fixes and improvements 🐛
- In the editor, there is now syntax highlighting for Nix and Julia languages, as well as for Ruby languages (ERB and Haml).
- In some cases, the notification page was crashing. This is now fixed.
- Safari only: Inline LaTeX blocks weren’t working when you’d click on them (they’d only work when pressing ‘enter’). This is now fixed.
We strive to provide the best possible experience for our users, and your feedback is essential in helping us achieve that goal.
Share your thoughts with us through our Feature Requests page. Whether you have any suggestions for improving the platform or specific requests for your workflow, we are eager to hear from you and take your input into consideration.
Thank you for being a part of our community and for helping us make Hashnode better! See you in the next update.