IMAGE: IMAGNO
Blogging platforms can often be cluttered and complicated, featuring a multitude of widgets and plugins that we might never use. However new publishing tools are being built that emphasize readability, simplicity and usability. These modern blog platforms put the focus on the writing experience, to create a distraction-free writing environment.
The exciting trend towards minimalist, responsive, typographic driven blogging, allows the content to shine. Many of these platforms support Markdown, which is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for writing on the web. Writing in Markdown means a document is as readable as possible, in plain text, reducing the time you spend formatting your blog posts.
You may already have used some of the major platforms already available, such as WordPress, Tumblr, Squarespace and Blogger, and found they didn't quite fit your needs. This post is a rundown of 16 of the best minimalist blogging platforms that pair down the features and focus on the writing.
1. Postagon
Postagon is equipped with just the essentials for a pure reading and writing experience. It features a visual and Markdown editor, smart commenting system, private posts and drafts, email alerts, drag and drop functionality, and the ability to publish posts via email. There's no separate mobile app required and you can use your own domain name, view your email subscribers, import and export posts, publish RSS feeds, and share posts on social networks. Postagon also features retina display support and is not ad supported, so your blog is kept simple and clutter free. From the dashboard you can view your email subscribers, with easy integration of Google Analytics. All of the features are optional, so if you don't need them you don't have to use them.
Price: $4.99 per month
2. Svbtle
Svbtle is an extremely simple writing writing and reading network that focuses on the writing, providing a simple platform for collecting and developing ideas, and sharing them with the world. Initially an invite-only writing network, Svbtle has now opened to the public. The dashboard is designed to work like your brain, and encourages you to dump ideas, links, and thoughts into a flow or draft posts. You can then work to slowly sculpt ideas into publishable articles, creating a more organic approach to blogging. There are no distractions, with only the essential styling options available, though articles can be written using shorthand formatting with Markdown for more control. Your full name appears by everything you write and you can use a custom domain and avatar.
Price: Free
3. Ghost
Ghost is dedicated to publishing and is completely customizable and open source, meaning it's free to modify, share and redistribute. It's designed to be simple and elegant, enabling you to spend less time making your blog work, and more time writing. It features a smart writing screen, with the Markdown editor on the left, and a live preview on the right. You can write down your ideas and format on the fly — you can even theme the preview pane to match your blog's formatting exactly. The dashboard pulls all the important data about your blog into one place, and you can drag and drop widgets to create your own custom dashboard. While Ghost is free, a dedicated, hosted platform is available to host your Ghost powered website.
Price: Free - $80 per month (Large hosting plan)
4. Wardrobe
Wardrobe is a minimalistic blogging application that aims to make blogging simple and enjoyable, by keeping the focus on the writing, and away from administration. All content is stored as Markdown so it's portable, with the ability to drag and drop Markdown files into the admin area to create posts for quick publishing. You can write posts and schedule the time and date you want them to appear. Wardrobe utilizes a simple yet powerful theming system, so almost any design can be integrated, meaning you can easily create a blog design to match your brand. Post tagging can be used for categorization and grouping. Installing Wardrobe is simple — once it's up and running you will be directed to the guided install process to prepare your database, create users and set your site title, theme, and page values.
Price: Free
5. Postach.io
Postach.io turns your Evernote notebook into a content management system, allowing you to hook into commenting tools such as Disqus, with support for Markdown and Google Analytics. Once you link Postach.io to your Evernote account, you grant it access to your notes and notebooks, and then need to choose a blog name and URL. You can use custom domains and upload custom profile avatars or logos directly on your site. Postach.io makes it possible to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos, Tweets, Instagram images, your About.me profile, and more. You can also connect your Tumblr account to automatically import your Tumblr posts to your Postach.io blog. When you create your blog, you have the option to have Postach.io automatically create an Evernote notebook where all your posts will be saved, or you can choose an existing notebook.
Price: Free - $5 per month (Premium)
6. Medium
Medium provides a simple, beautiful, collaborative platform to help you find the right audience for what you have to say. There are no distractions, no sidebars, plugins or widgets, with nothing to setup or customize, and your words and images will look great on any device. With the composing tool you have just the right amount of formatting. Simply select the text you wish to format and a toolbar will pop up with just a few simple formatting options. With Medium you're not writing 'alone', you can invite feedback, share posts, and link to other articles that share the same context. You can submit your story to relevant collections, set up an RSS feed, and recommend pieces you like. You don't need to be “internet famous” to have your post to reach hundreds of thousands of readers, as Medium uses a combination of algorithms and editorial curation based on interest and engagement.
Price: Free
7. Jekyll
Jekyll transforms your plain text into static websites and blogs, with no need for databases, comment moderation or updates. meaning you get to concentrate on creating great content. It works by taking a template directory containing raw text files, runs them through Markdown and Liquid convertors, and generates a complete, ready-to-publish static website. As Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, you can use Jekyll to host your project's page, blog, or website from GitHub's servers. If you're switching to Jekyll from another blogging system, Jekyll's importers can help with the move. All you need to do to maintain your blog is manage a folder of text-files on your computer, with absolutely no hassle that comes with the usual CMS's.
Price: Free
8. Anchor
Anchor is a super-simple lightweight, blog system that gives you full freedom over your words. You can write in Markdown or HTML, and creating and modifying a theme is as simple as knowing some very simple PHP and HTML/CSS. If you want to add custom CSS, JavaScript, or an image to a post, just drag the file over to Anchor. You can create and utilize theme hooks without the need for any programming knowledge. The system is extensible, so you can add or remove an infinite amount of custom fields to any post or page, with the ability to make every article unique by adding custom CSS, JavaScript, or HTML to your posts or pages. Anchor weighs just 150kb and takes only two minutes to install.
Price: Free
9. Bolt
Bolt is a sophisticated, lightweight, simple CMS, that is quick to set up. It’s perfect for those that need a system that’s easy to configure, manage and maintain, but is also flexible and versatile. It enables users to spend more time producing and editing content, with a fully responsive dashboard that supports mobile and tablet devices. There is a basic structure for user levels and easy file and image upload. The change log keeps a log file of all changes to the content, so if you're working within a team, you'll be able to see who edited which page on the website. The flexible content types mean you can use different files in your content to create various content pages, like blog entries, events, book reviews, galleries, and more. Bolt comes packaged with field types, flexible taxonomies, built in search, multi-language support, and the ability to use custom routing and redirection.
Price: Free
10. Hexo
Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework powered by Node.js, that supports multi-thread generating, so hundreds of files take just seconds to generate. Your posts are parsed with Markdown which then generates static files, with installation taking just a few minutes. Hexo also supports GitHub flavored Markdown, Octopress plugins, Jekyll, EJS, Swig and Stylus. There are nearly 40 themes to choose from, including Bootstrap and iOS inspired through to a theme that generates 301 redirection pages for site migration. It's simple to get started, just make sure you have both Git and Node.js installed. Node.js is a platform built on Google Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications.Poet is another simple blog framework built on Node.js, that is worth checking out.
Price: Free
11. Silvrback
Silvrback is a hosted, Markdown-powered blog that features a clean, modern UI and complete control over your brand. The homepage has space for a profile image, bio and Twitter handle, with the ability to add links and navigation. You can customize your blog to suit your brand, and readers can subscribe to be notified by email when you publish a new article. Silvrback features YouTube, JsFiddle and Vimeo embedding capabilities, and the sleek dashboard UI has a slide-out menu for easy navigation. Comments are powered by Disqus, with support for Typekit fonts and hack-friendly syntax highlighting. Silvrback boasts compelling archive and bio pages, custom favicon support and a neat real-time post preview tool. As Silvrback is built on the backbone of AWS, it is setup to autoscale when a traffic surge is detected, so you never need to worry about your blog going down.
Price: Free
12. Roon
Roon is a beautiful, distraction free blogging platform, with no setup or code necessary. It works on all mobile and tablet devices, with each app all focused on the writing experience rather than a list of features. If you maintain multiple blogs, just hit 'Add New Blog' and you can create a fresh new blog, all under the same user account. Roon gives you the choice of writing in Markdown or in Rich Text mode, and you can switch between modes at any time. Your blog is neatly organized into one zip file, should you wish to export your data, with each post saved as a Markdown file inside its own directory, along with any images you may have uploaded. There are premium add-ons available to purchase that extend the feature set of Roon, including custom domains and custom analytics.
Price: Free
13. Posthaven
After Posterous shut down in 2012, its two founding members created Posthaven, with a promise to last forever, only asking enough to cover server costs each month. It's a long-term project which aims to create one of the best blogging platforms in the world, and to keep it alive for as long as possible. You can create up to 10 blogs, post by email, and create posts using the web post editor. Posthaven offers the ability to upload photos, music, videos, documents, and any kind of file to your blog. You can autopost to Facebook and Twitter, follow blogs using email notifications, have multiple contributors per blog and setup your blog as private with a secure password. The automatic antispam commenting system means you spend less time editing blog comments, and more time writing.
Price: $5 per month
14. Scriptogram
Scriptogram is a tool for generating simple, elegant, static blogs by reading Markdown files stored in your Dropbox folder. You can write with your preferred editor application (and publish from there), or from the Scriptogram dashboard, by clicking 'Synchronize'. You can choose from a selection of beautiful themes from the theme directory, or use your own. Scriptogram is designed to be invisible, as text formatting, post titles, dates and tags are all handled within your editor of choice. Using HTML and CSS you can tweak and edit existing themes or create a new one, to match your branding. Getting started is simple, just authorize Scriptogram to connect to your account, it will then create a new folder to store your posts, you then enter your email address and choose a username, which forms part of the URL where your blog can be accessed. If you like Scriptogram, you might also want to check outCalepin, which reads Markdown-formatted text files in your Dropbox, and converts them into blog posts.
Price: Free
15. Pen.io
Pen.io allows anyone to publish on the web without going through a signup process or creating an account. You can create a permanent webpage with your content, without registering a domain or paying for hosting. It's easy to create a post, just type in your page title and a password, so you can make changes and edits, and hit 'Create New Page'. Your edits are automatically saved as you make sure, so there's no need to worry about losing any updates. There is no back-end to maintain, as you make edits on the fly, and publishing multiple pages is simple - just insert the ":page" tag. You can drag and drop photos and add YouTube video URLs, and is perfect for those who don't want to commit to starting a blog, but want to share their writing, essays, poems, research projects and lots more. Once you've finished, Pen.io provides you with a unique URL for your page, so you can easily share it with others.
Price: Free
16. Dropplets
Dropplets is a platform dedicated to making blogging simple, with no database to maintain, you can install Dropplets on any server, compose offline using Markdown and publish to your own domain. Installation takes as little as 30 seconds, just download the zip file, extract it and upload the extracted files to your server. You can then load your website in any browser and follow the setup instructions. Dropplets allows you to compose your blog posts in in any text editor using Markdown, which is simple, memorizable and lightweight. Once you're ready to publish your post, just change the post status to 'Published' and then upload your Markdown file, using the uploader. While Dropplets comes with a free template to use, there are premium templates available to purchase in the marketplace. As it's open source, you can contribute on GitHub to the development of Dropplets.
