Over the last couple of days, I put the finishing touches to the Commonmarks application so that others can deploy it easily to Heroku. The reason I went down this route is that self-hosting Commonmarks is a something I want people to be able to do, but I’m not at the stage yet where Commonmarks can be quickly deployed to any SAAS platform or even your own server. Going down the Heroku route was a short term solution.

If you take a look at the top of the README file on the Commonmarks Github repository you’ll see a Deploy To Heroku button that you can use to deploy. You’ll need a Heroku account to do this. The add-ons needed for the application to run are free including the dynos required to run the application. I’ve been running Commonmarks on a free dyno for over a month now without any problem.

This brings me to the next step. I’m now working on Commonmarks as a hosted bookmarking product that anyone can sign up for if they don’t want to run their own version of Commonmarks. I appreciate there are people on both sides of the fences, but there are probably more people who want to go with the hosted option than the self-hosted option. I’m not looking to have this running for another couple of weeks, and I’ll be initially opening up with a small beta to get feedback.

Updates will follow.