In order to allow people to try it out, we have decided to make it free to signup and publish your first blog post. That way you have all the time you need to draft content and set up your blog before subscribing. You only need to upgrade to a paid account ($5) when you are ready to publish the rest of your content. So feel free to give it a try!

This weekend we released our second theme, Paper! It comes with a few color customization options for now, including an optional light and dark mode. But we are curious to discover how users will want to customize their themes.

Yea I found myself in the same situation for creating a portfolio but finally ended up creating something from scratch with a SSG. There are some services aimed at the specific needs of portfolios and presenting case studies. Uxfol.io, Format, Carbonmade, and Semplice come to mind but I am sure there are ton more.

I am glad to hear that you are excited to try it out! We are still debating on whether or not to support a trial period, but I will definitely work on presenting more of the product on the website this week. And maybe even adding a demo. So stay tuned!

I realized I didn't even mention that we allow custom domains! And they are actually core to the values of our product. We want our presence to be non-existent on your blog. Unlike Substack we aren't trying to build our brand through our customers. Your content and site are yours and only yours.

This week we are focused on how we want customizations and theming to work. We actually designed the product so that any SSG theme can be used on our service, but we would probably want to be opinionated about which ones we might offer if we go that route.

That is fair, we shouldn't assume that users understand what a static site generator is (or that they need to know at all) but should instead highlight the resulting benefits like speed, security, and portability.

On one end you get an Evernote/Notion/Bear style editor and on the other you get a reliably fast and personal feeling website.

Static site generators are an "easy" way to start an independent blog or website but getting started still requires a lot of technical expertise. So we started with the idea of removing the overhead of getting it set up by running a hosted version of Jekyll, like WordPress(.com) or Ghost(Pro).

While there are plenty of options for using a headless CMS with a static site generator, they typically aren't designed to be an end-to-end hosted solution aimed at non-developer users. And their editors tend to mimic a traditional CMS, falling somewhere between a simple what-you-see-is-never-what-you-get and an overly complicated drag-and-drop experience.

For the design of our editing experience, we have taken inspiration from Ghost (1.0) and note-taking applications like Evernote or Notion because we want it to feel content-focused and personal.

I am excited to try Subform.

He wasn't commenting on the article.

Give me something I don't own.