I have been looking into minimalist, no-clutter, no-frills blogging platforms for writing and came across a few. Most of us do not need a full-fledged WordPress or Ghost.org for occasional writing. HEY World was launched with the same principles. Too much focus on metrics, analytics, and likes distracts your attention from the actual writing. Being unable to customize your theme, tinker with the fonts, and not having too many theme choices can be very liberating. No commenting or thumbs up. It was validating to see others resonate with this approach, too. Here are the options that I came across.
Svbtle has been designed very well in a minimalistic sense and promises to be around forever, which may be necessary for many of us. They talk about how their dashboard helps you be a better writer. There is no free plan, but you do have a 7-day free trial.
Svbtle is a publishing platform designed from the ground up to work the same way your brain does. It helps you think.
The platform includes everything you need to organize, develop, and share your thoughts, stories, and ideas with the world. Svbtle’s dashboard is a flow of unpublished ideas, or draft works-in-progress, on the left side, and a list of published articles on the right. It’s designed to help you curate thoughts and stories, work on them slowly, and publish when you’re ready.
Articles and blogs are clean and legible. They’ve been obsessively built to be fast, deceptively simple, reliable, and beautiful.
We hate when the services we use and love are shut down. So Svbtle comes with a promise: your content will remain online forever.
write.as can start off as a minimalistic service, but if you wish to grow your blog, add team members, expand to a photo blog, accept submissions from others, and so forth, this would be more appropriate for you. It seems that they have a very vibrant and active community. This platform appears to be the most mature of all the ones on this list. They have their own mobile apps too which is unique.
Services like blot.im take a novel approach by doing away with having their interface altogether. They let you connect your favorite text editor and just let you use a shared dropbox or google drive folder, which is synced with their service, and that is how you publish your posts. It is very frictionless and easy. If you want simplicity but a variety of layouts and templates for some customization, blot will appeal to you. However, I see broken links on their templates page, which always concerns me when recommending a service.
Blot turns a folder into a website. Files become posts on your site. Drag-and-drop to publish. There’s no interface, just files. So you can use your favorite tools to work on your site. Focus on creating. Write your blog with your favorite text editor. Vim or Microsoft Word, both work with Blot. Publish your photos from Lightroom. Work on your site with others using Google Docs or git.
Posterous' demise led to the creation of Post Haven, where you can simply email a post to your blog. This is similar to what HEY World lets you do. They, too, have the forever promise, as with svbtle above.
We'll never raise money. We'll never get acquired. We'll never shut down.In fact, we don't even take salaries. All proceeds go directly to sustaining Posthaven for the next 100+ years
Pay for at least a year and your site stays online.If we can't charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online.
Silvrback is relatively cheaper, but its website and template are dated, and I wonder if this service is seeing a slow decline.
Scribbles.page takes pride in its clean, distraction-free editor and dashboard, where you can focus on your writing. A regularly updated blog or status page tells me the creator is invested in further evolving the project. They have relaunched their lifetime plan.
Micro.blog has a vibrant community of users and rave reviews. Although they do not offer a free plan to get started, they do offer a free trial and have a native app on all platforms.
“Micro.blog gave me a frictionless way to do what I always wanted to do: put my thoughts and feelings out there on my own blog.” — Gabriel Santiago. "Micro.blog is a place where 'users' can became people again. It’s social at the speed of human." — Greg Moore “Slower paced, quieter and thus less demanding on one’s attention. It’s not about chasing likes or followers, or posting quick takes.” — Paul Robert Lloyd “Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.“ – Brent Simmons “The social network you can feel good about.” — Annie Mueller
Btw.so is still in infancy and they will have you manually contact the team to sign up for a pro version. I could not find a unique differentiating offering at this service.
This isn’t open to public yet, but if you can’t wait, email deepti@btw.so & we’ll set you up with btw on your custom domain.
Services like Montaigne.io / alto.so and quotion convert your Apple notes into webpages and blog posts. Kissr, site44, and drop pages let you do the same with your Dropbox account. You are more likely to blog regularly using one of these services since all you have to do is create a new Apple note or a new text file in your dropbox folder. Some other notable services are - Mataroa ($9 per year for custom domain- one of the cheapest option), bearblog, smol.pub($5 one time fee for custom domain) and Pika.
Most of these services let you trial out the premium version for a certain number of days. After that you will fork out $5 to 12 per month if you wish to point a custom domain to your page. If you are looking for website services that let you point a custom domain for free - see this post. My most considerable hesitation about smaller services is that they may vaporize in a few years and no longer exist. So, you should have an easy way to export your content. And use your domain for your blog.
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