Cool Tools Around the Indie Web

Lately, I have stumbled across some pretty cool tools focused on the indie web. So, I thought I would try out a few.

It seems that the indie web, small web, or personal site movement is growing. As a response to that movement, people are creating some pretty cool tools to help lower the barrier into the personal site arena. Here are just a few that I came across this week.

VerbaMea

VerbaMea was launched by Forking Mad+ who describes it as:

a blank page and you type whatever you want. Save it; share it. No login, No verification. No hassle. You’re not asked for any personal details to get published.

Think of it as a Pastebin for your thoughts. It reminds me of the now retired Txti. Head on over to https://verbamea.com/new and you are presented with a title field and a body field. The body field does support markdown for text formatting. The minimalist UI lets you start writing immediately.

Once you have written your post, you can set some options like showing a create or update date, setting a password for future edits, and setting an email for password recovery. All of these settings are optional. So, you can set them or not, then click Save to publish your work. Once published, the reader is presented with a stylized post. You can see my test post at: https://verbamea.com/2510d11f63.

It is definitely a neat tool and I can see a number of use cases for it. I will keep my eye on the project as I was dissapointed when Txti was retired. VerbaMea looks like a great replacement and I look forward to see where the project goes.

PageCord

While having my morning coffee with Mastodon, I saw a post by @[email protected] talking quite positively about Pagecord, which describes itself as:

Publish effortlessly using email or the Pagecord editor. People can follow along using RSS, or subscribe by email to get your posts automatically in a weekly digest. It's the perfect antidote to social media scrollverload.

Blog posting via email piqued my interest; so, I had to I give it a spin. Account creation was simple. I just had to pick a subdomain (https://readbeanicecream.pagecord.com) and provide an email address. Once I verified my email address, account setup was just as simple. I added a blog title, a short bio, color scheme, font, and home page layout. These were all just quick selections on a single page. In about two minutes, I was ready to write.

The web editor was simple and easy to use. And the published content was clean and easy to read. If you have ever written anything using a wysiwyg editor, you will feel right at home. You can see my web editor post at https://readbeanicecream.pagecord.com/pagecord-editor-lorem-ipsum. But, what I was really interested in was the ability to post via email.

That was just as easy. The email subject is the post title and the body of the email is the post body. That's it. You can see that post at https://readbeanicecream.pagecord.com/pagecord-email-post. It took about 30 seconds for the emailed post to appear on my homefeed. I couldn't immediately find the RSS feed, but a quick view source shows that it is just the domain with /feed.xml appended. For example, https://readbeanicecream.pagecord.com/feed.xml. Once I added the feed URL to my feed reader, the posts appeared in my feed reader as expected.

Adding an additional page was as easy as adding a new post. Though, I did have to close completely out of the site and back in to see the link in the nav. My new page link did not appear on refresh, but that's okay.

Pagecord has to be about the easiest setup that I have seen and I like the email to post feature.

Bear Blog

Bear Blog has been popping up more and more. I even follow a few bear bloggers (is that even a term?) via RSS. So, since I was already trying out VerbaMea and Pagecord, I figured why not give Bear Blog a whirl, too.

Bear Blog describes itself as:

A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform. No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.

Sign up was easy as 1-2-3:

1. Title
2. Subdomain
3. Home page text/bio

Then, you are prompted to provide an email and password. Once the account is created, you are taken to your dashboard.

The Bear Blog dashboard has a lot more going on than the other previously mentioned tools, but it is intuitive enough so that you know what to do next. I went ahead and selected a theme, edited/published my homepage, and created my first post. Again, it only took me about 10 minutes to get up and running. You can see my home page at https://readbeanicecream.bearblog.dev/ and my first post at https://readbeanicecream.bearblog.dev/lorem-ipsum/.

Bear Blog does have a lot more bells and whistles when compared to the other two; and honestly, I did not really dive deep into them. However, what I did tinker with was easy-to-use and provided a clean result. I will have to spend a little more time with Bear Blog especially around the advanced settings, analytics, and customizable CSS.

I didn't immediately see the RSS, but looking at the source, Bear Blog provides an RSS (https://readbeanicecream.bearblog.dev/feed/?type=rss) and and an Atom (https://readbeanicecream.bearblog.dev/feed/) feed. I was able to quickly add that to the nav bar and it displayed on refresh. Also, when adding the feeds to my rss feed reader, the posts synced as expected.

Overall even though Bear Blog was slightly more complex than the other two, it was still easy to use and much easier than building and deploying a site from scratch.

All in All

All in all, yes, I spent my afternoon tinkering around with blogging or indie web tools. And yes, it was time well spent. All of these tools are clean, well thought out, and provides great results depending on your individual needs. Not sure that I will move from my beloved Mkdocs-material + surge setup for any of these tools, but for anyone that wants an easy setup/easy post situation, I would recommend any of these tools in a heartbeat.