PUREBLOG

Pure Blog has been a natural progression from over a decade of using many different tools to power my blog. All of which gave some level of frustration:

• WordPress gave me power, but far too much bloat and complexity.
• Jekyll gave me simplicity, but static site generators lack on-the-go editing.
• Ghost has a fantastic editor, but leans heavily into newsletters and audience-building.
• Kirby is brilliant, but configuring the panel to my liking always felt like a chore.
• Bear Blog is lovely, but the editor is a bit too bare-bones for me.

Before Pure Blog, I built Hyde, a small CMS to manage my Jekyll site. That worked well for a bit, but eventually I wondered if I could just build a complete, self-contained blogging platform from scratch that did everything I wanted without the fluff and frustration.

Pure Blog is the result. It's lightweight, uses flat files, and is built specifically for personal blogging on the small web.

Features

Here's what you get out of the box:

• Flat-file storage – content is stored in Markdown files with front matter (no database to manage).
• Simple admin dashboard – clean, distraction-free writing and managing of posts and pages.
• Drafts & previews – check your posts before publishing them live.
• Tags & archives – optional tagging and archive pages for grouping posts.
• Pagination – automatic page navigation as your post archive grows.
• RSS feed – built-in /feed so people can subscribe.
• Search – quick search across titles, descriptions, and content.
• Settings page – simple site-wide configuration and theming.

If you just want a simple place to write without wrestling with database maintenance or plugin overload, Pure Blog might be for you.

Demo

If you want to truly get a feel for how Pure Blog works without having to setup your own instance, take a look at the Pure Blog demo site.

This is a full working demo of Pure Blog that resets every 15 minutes, so have a play around and get a feel for it.

If you don't have time to play with the demo, here's some screenshots of what the default experience of Pure Blog looks like:

The admin dashboard

Content page

Content editor

Content editor with settings open

Design settings

Default front end