Show HN: Pika – Simple blogging software
pika.pageHello HN!
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! I am not your target audience but I love the branding and all of the other stuff you make on https://goodenough.us/. The world needs more cutesy, thought through mini project factories like 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? FWIW, $60 seems fair enough from where I stand. It's about the same price as what it'd take to run WordPress off a VPS, except, I don't need to manage the software or the server. Incidentally, $60 is also the lowest WP.com tier. > The world needs more cutesy, thought through mini project factories like you. Totally agreed! Thank you! 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! $60 is around what it would cost for an individual to self-host a dedicated Digital Ocean VPS to achieve the same end. Pricing doesn't seem too bad in that regard. Pardon the vulgar words. This is just a copy paste from an Icelandic dictionary:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%ADka Noun píka f (genitive singular píku, nominative plural píkur) Well, it's also an animal [1]: > 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). I think you’re correct. Given the logo on the page https://pika.page/assets/PIKA-1-4c239559b5c269c22420092ed5fe... > Show HN: Pika “Yeah, does not sound like a SFW click to me. I’ll read the comments first at least.” - My Icelandic brain while scrolling HN. Honestly, my first thought was the disorder "Pica" [0]. Naming collisions are just a fact of life, I don't think Pika is bad enough so as to make it not useful. Wonder what Icelanders think of Pika-chu Haha I had the same thought, I wonder if they have changed it to something else or at least when he talks - "pika pika" Only words offensive in English count (e.g. Coq). Words offensive in other languages (bit, pika) are ok! Can't tell if you're sarcastic, or whether you just established some rules that we will now dutifully follow. In portuguese, pica (written with C but it sounds like K) is slang for dick. Love the website! Just beware that by making it completely free without any credit card required you are going to battle a bit of spam. I liked the solution that bearblog[1] implemented. I would love to hear how you solved this problem! [1] https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-chatgpt-vs-bear-blog-spam-wa... Thank you for the note. We will be vigilant! Admittedly, I switch blogging platforms every season or so. however, Pika has stood out and stuck so far because it has struck the right balance for me in terms of customization, editing experience, and vibe. I've been writing Markdown since its inception, but I find I prefer Pika's WYSIWYG editor. I realize with blogging, I don't want to deal with Markdown. I know I'm parroting the marketing message here, but that just shows how much the good enough folks have hit the target for me. So glad you have found a place that matches what you need for blogging, Ben. Thank you for the nice message!! This looks really nice, and it's also the first time I hear about Good Enough. Big fan of the Basecamp-ish design with "real" large buttons. I was considering https://micro.blog/ in the past but Pika looks a bit more polished, especially the simple editor. 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. Thank you for the kind words! 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. I can relate to wanting something simpler to use than a static site generator or a full fledged CMS! 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! Big fan of what you're doing with PostOwl! Hereby feel encouraged to build that hosted version. More blogging options to fit more blogger personalities means more blogs. We want that! Why pay $6/month for blogging when there are so many free options? 1 of your 50 blog posts
0 of your 3 pages Subscribe to Pika Pro to unlock: I pay for email, and blog hosting, and a fair few software subscriptions because: - 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. Hear, hear! We greatly dislike the ad model and greatly dislike the data-mining model. Let's normalize paying for a thing that you enjoy, as well as companies going for self-sustaining rather than giant exits. 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 just use Zola, fast, free, open source, you are in full control of everything. From the text of the submission (scroll up). > 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! I agree, and that’s why I use Zola, no JavaScript, and no dependencies like gatsby, and isn’t overly complicated like hugo or similar, it is in fact one binary! Set it up locally or directly on the cloud, choose a theme by placing it in a folder, and all your blog posts will be in one folder, to create a post, you just create a folder/file that is mark down, fully featured with vids and what not if you needed it. Everything is independent, you are not relying on a vendor, not a cloud provider, use whatever text editor you want, and it will build the whole website in milliseconds. For what it's worth, this website is geared more towards software developers than writers. That's probably fine? But your market is going to be much smaller than if you focused on writers and regular people. It wouldn't take a lot to make this better for regular people, but you would need to get a non-software-developer to sit down and tell you all the stuff you should remove, and product copy to rewrite. Keen observation! We needed to start somewhere with our messaging, and that place is basically to reach out to people in my own position. Given that familiarity, we could build a message and test it out in this niche. 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! This looks super cool; thanks so much for sharing! I'm probably an outlier, but when I saw this name I thought of the eating disorder [1]. Maybe unpopular, but I wanted something very simple so I installed vanilla wordpress and customized a bare-metal theme. I removed commenting, used minimal CSS, and it's pretty nice as a minimal blogging platform that's still easy to use. Not that unpopular. I use wordpress too. But the mobile editor is really awful, so I keep thinking of finding something else. I agree with OP in that I really, really dislike SSG (always fiddly, I waste too much time on maintenance/setup, and virtually no way to do things on mobile). A WordPress install is a great option, especially if you like the feature set and the interface. We've got work to do on Pika, but it already has a mobile editor that is quite nice! Substack makes me think blogging solutions need to have a built in email subscription feature. Otherwise, what, normal people are gonna use an RSS feed? More likely they just never come back. TBH this is where I'm at as well. Sadly I've yet to really see a good "simple blogging" product that does both. I use (and love) Blot.im for my own blog but still have to copy/paste to Substack/Buttondown to send the email. I agree! This is just our first version, and email subscriptions are definitely on our radar. > Give Pika a try snorts in Brazilian Aaand.. we have a combo! (there's an icelandic version of this word someone mentioned earlier)
Sorry for the dirty joke. If you want to charge money for a blogging platform, you have to offer a feature for blogg authors to paywall and sell subscriptions. That's what is missing in all free blog platforms, and it's the one feature that serious blog writers will pay for. Counter example - I pay for my account on Dreamwidth, and so do enough other people to keep the place running. Because that way they don't need to have advertising and the whole place is nicer because of it. I agree with this. The only person who is paying money for a blog platform is someone who is making money from that blog. A blog that makes money needs tons of features for analytics, monetization, SEO, etc. i.e.: Not a clean and simple one. 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. > The only person who is paying money for a blog platform is someone who is making money from that blog. 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. "Why would I pay $6/mo (or $60/yr) when I can self host it?!" 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" I don't know if self hosting is the competitor to a paid blogging platform, rather it is social media that is the competitor. Most bloggers don't have a domain, they're publishing on Facebook and other social media, who are making a killing of these people without giving them a good damned dime back. I can deploy my blog for free on GitHub pages. Usually when people talk about self-hosting they are not going to put it on a separate server, but run it on their existing server that already has a lot of other software running. So it would be more like spending 20/month running 7 services instead of paying 6/month * 7. Love the minimalism of this and the other software listed on your site. More apps should just do one thing and do it well. One of us! One of us! I like this simple implementation. I don't like the fact that it can't be self-hosted. They will go under sooner or later and will take all blogs with them. The "why" on the website is almost exactly why Ghost blog was started. Love your company name
(anatomy) a vulva, a pussy, a cunt
(vulgar, slang) a bitch
Unlimited blog posts
Unlimited pages
Hosting your Pika blog on your domain
The option to hide the Pika brand on your blog
