before.town: turn Simplenote into Blog

Another blog platform? Why? Why spent time to an already fixed problem? Because it isn't.

• Substack: too complicated, and I don't want to take 10000 subscribers as my aim.
• Hey World: too expansive, $100/year ? no, no, no...
• Medium: Don't want to see the large "Membership" every time I visit a post.
• Twitter: Have no interest in playing the eye-catching game.
• Wordpress: too complicated, and a bit expensive.
• Bearblog: simple enough, just no my type, and don't want to open browser every time I want to write something.

See? If all you want is a quiet place where you can write something, there aren't many options(unless you're a programmer).

That's why I create before.town, in Chinese it is pronounced as 避风塘, which is a place to shelter from hurricanes. To use it, you need two tools: Simplenote and Telegram.

Simplenote is simple note app that has existed for more than 10 years, and works on all platforms. It's just simple and reliable. it was acquired by Automattic(WordPress's parent company) in 2013. Its simplicity, not only make it easy to use, but also makes it low cost.

One feature that makes Simplenote bloggable, is Simplenote's note can be shared online. So one day a thought came to my mind: why not turn Simplenote into a blog platform? it has some obvious advantages:

• Content can be managed by note app in all platform natively.
• Content can be backed up conveniently.

To aggregate shared urls into one page and style it, there should be a page to describe these information(detail can be revealed on before.town's homepage), and tell the platform that you want to make it the blog's homepage, here comes the telegram bot: @beforetown_bot, you send the Simplenote's shared url as homepage, it will return you your blog url, like https://before.town/@limboy

then, all of a sudden, you have a blog, and the contents are managed by Simplenote.