I wanted to share something we at Good Enough (https://goodenough.us) built over the past month.
Pika! https://pika.page
I know, I know, who needs more blogging software? In this case, _I DO_. I find that the big players in the market have a distracting number of dials and knobs. I greatly appreciate the indieweb players in the space, but none of those solutions quite fit my way of blogging and so I'd bounce from one to the other to the other. I tried SSGs and my goodness do I dislike the experience of maintaining a website with them. I dislike the SSG experience so much that before convincing the team to build Pika with me, I was actually blogging by writing straight HTML!
Pika is about simplifying blogging down to writing. Pika provides a great editor that doesn't _require_ Markdown (but accepts it) and a light bit of easy-to-use customizability without distracting you. With that baseline, we hope Pika can be a nice place for semi-technical folks to start or continue their blogging journey without all of the fiddly bits. In the longer term we'd like to make blogging more and more accessible to those who are non-technical, and we will grow our feature set and UX accordingly.
We would love to hear thoughts from anyone that is an active blogger or considering starting a blog. Also, if you know someone who is on the hunt for easy, beautiful blogging software we'd appreciate you letting them know about Pika. Thank you!
As for pricing, 60$ seems very steep. I disregard the 6$/mo because aside from trying out for a month, who would host a blog for less than a year? But turns out this is the exact pricing a write.as (which is nearly identical to this project from what I can tell, only with a proven track record) so I guess that is where you got the pricepoint from?
Incidentally, $60 is also the lowest WP.com tier.
> The world needs more cutesy, thought through mini project factories like you.
Totally agreed!
We definitely are looking at what's out there now when deciding our pricing, but we are certainly prepared to adapt as we learn more about the space!
Noun
píka f (genitive singular píku, nominative plural píkur)
(anatomy) a vulva, a pussy, a cunt
(vulgar, slang) a bitch> A pika is a small, mountain-dwelling mammal native to Asia and North America. With short limbs, a very round body, an even coat of fur, and no external tail, they resemble their close relative, the rabbit, but with short, rounded ears. The large-eared pika of the Himalayas and nearby mountains lives at elevations of more than 6,000 m (20,000 ft).
Given the logo on the page
https://pika.page/assets/PIKA-1-4c239559b5c269c22420092ed5fe...
“Yeah, does not sound like a SFW click to me. I’ll read the comments first at least.” - My Icelandic brain while scrolling HN.
Naming collisions are just a fact of life, I don't think Pika is bad enough so as to make it not useful.
[1] https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-chatgpt-vs-bear-blog-spam-wa...
If someone were to move their Hugo blog to Pika, do you offer a way to import existing blogs, or for example set redirect URLs?
Have you considered selling a self-hosting license like https://once.com/campfire or https://getkirby.com? Doesn't have to be open source.
At the moment we don't have an import tool. We know that it's pretty important, but launch before you're comfortable and all of that. :) Likewise, if I were moving I would like some redirection options. These things are definitely on our radar.
Self-hosting is certainly an interesting avenue. Our model is very SaaS at the moment, but nothing is off the table.
For me to use a personal website application I want it to be open source in case the provider ever disappears. I took this approach with my take on a personal blogging app, PostOwl (https://github.com/PostOwl/postowl). It has a similar in-place editing feel to Pika. Now I just need to offer a hosted version so people don't have to install it themselves!
1 of your 50 blog posts 0 of your 3 pages
Subscribe to Pika Pro to unlock:
Unlimited blog posts
Unlimited pages
Hosting your Pika blog on your domain
The option to hide the Pika brand on your blog- I want companies to be able to pay their employees and continue offering the service I enjoy
- I want to not feel like a burden if/when I do need support
- I want to not be the product sold to advertisers
I have an iPhone app that I depend on for one of my hobbies, but because they never successfully monetized it, it’s abandonware, and I have to just hope that Apple never breaks it with an OS upgrade.
And if you have the technical know-how and time budget, by all means set up your own OSS blog on a server and enjoy!
> I tried SSGs and my goodness do I dislike the experience of maintaining a website with them. I dislike the SSG experience so much that before convincing the team to build Pika with me, I was actually blogging by writing straight HTML!
In some regards I'd love for that niche to be large enough to provide a good revenue stream for our team. The features we'd build would be more obvious to us, and they could be designed for a more technically-skilled audience.
That seems unlikely, though. And while building for the technical folks is enticing, I also would love a world where more people from various backgrounds are blogging. I would love to be able to go read 20 years of blog posts from my parents, or to read blog posts that my children write as they enter adulthood.
We've already done some user testing with non-technical folks and there are, of course, glaring challenges. Building for regular people who'd like to write will be hard work, but we have a team with lots of experience in this area!
I'm probably an outlier, but when I saw this name I thought of the eating disorder [1].
We've got work to do on Pika, but it already has a mobile editor that is quite nice!
snorts in Brazilian
I like the look of PIKA. But since I don't expect to make a dime from blogging, I'm not going to pay a dime to do it. Free/open/self-hosted solutions are the only ones I'll consider.
I disagree and I’m someone who has paid for a blog platform and/or hosting for well over a decade. I don’t make a penny from my blog and I don’t even blog regularly. Some people just want a place to store their thoughts online for others even if it costs a little bit of money.
Because even if you went with a $5/mo droplet at DigitalOcean, you're going save what? A dollar a month, plus have to do all the maintenance of keeping it running.
I mean yeah if self hosting is more your style, go ahead, but it's weird to me that people expect free to compete with "I'm paying someone else but doing all the work myself"
They will go under sooner or later and will take all blogs with them.