Are you using Pure Blog?
If you are, it would be great if you considered buying me a coffee to help support Pure Blog development. Things like this really help open source software thrive. You can donate via Ko-fi, or sponsor me on GitHub. ❤️
Pure Blog wasn’t born out of a desire to build yet another blogging platform. It came from more than a decade of writing online and constantly tweaking the tools I used along the way. After years of switching between platforms, building themes, and bending systems to fit how I like to write, I eventually reached a point where I knew exactly what I wanted from a blog, and what I didn’t.
That realisation led me to build Hyde, a small CMS for my Jekyll site. It did the job beautifully, but it also planted a much bigger question in my mind:
Could I build a full blogging platform from the ground up?
Turns out, I could. And Pure Blog is the result.
It reflects the lessons I’ve learned from every platform I’ve touched over the years:
- WordPress gave me power, but too much complexity.
- Jekyll gave me simplicity, but not enough flexibility.
- Ghost has a fantastic editing experience, but leans hard into audience-building, which I don’t need.
- Kirby is brilliant, but getting the panel exactly right takes a lot of effort.
- Bear Blog is lovely, but its editor is a bit too minimal for my taste.
Pure Blog sits somewhere in the middle of all of those experiences. It’s intentionally small, intentionally simple, and built to solve the exact problems I’ve run into as a long-time blogger.
Features
Pure Blog tries to keep the essentials while avoiding the clutter. Nothing here is meant to impress with complexity, it’s all just the stuff that makes day-to-day blogging smooth and enjoyable:
- Flat-file content using Markdown and front matter.
- A clean, distraction-free admin dashboard for writing and organising posts/pages.
- Draft previews so you can check your work before publishing.
- Optional tags and tag archives for grouping related posts.
- Automatic pagination when your post list grows long.
- An RSS feed so readers can follow along however they like.
- Built-in search that helps readers find exactly what they’re looking for.
- A settings page that allows you to customise and configure your blog.
It’s everything I want in a blogging platform, after more than a decade of trying other tools, but none of the stuff I always found myself fighting against. If you find it useful too, that's fantastic.
Here's a quick video that showcases some of Pure Blogs features: