~/.unplanned
March 23rd, 2024

My second Scribble post, about my first

I just spent a few minutes using my new Scribbles account to write down some thoughts about a topic that has come up.

Scribbles is a pre-release blogging tool from Vincent Ritter, who I am mostly aware of from his work in and around micro.blog and Tinylytics.

Its starting point is: 

Over 3 years ago, I had a very similar idea to HEY World, with a simple blogging flow to just write. This was, and is, also partially inspired by spending time on Micro.blog and writing there. I still want to explore this concept where you just simply write, and publish, with your standard RSS feeds and a public viewing page – with super simple styling to just get your words out there. No themes and nothing fancy.

To that end, it is a pretty simple service: 

  • You can write posts using a simple WYSIWYG editor that understands basic keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, strikethrough, and linking. You can make one level of heading, blockquotes, code blocks, and ordered/unordered lists. No Markdown. 
  • You can set up a custom domain using a CNAME with your DNS provider.
  • You can change your blog's accent color and your photo/avatar/logo. 
  • There are integrations with Tinylytics, omg.lol status posts, and shoutouts.lol which is a micro ad service. 
  • You can customize a few details, like the text of your RSS link. 
  • You can save drafts. 


It sounds like there's a mail-to-post service coming, which I'd love to see, because when I trialed HEY, I thought HEY World seemed like a cool, low-friction blogging option but ... HEY.

Last week I was curious about Blot, which uses Dropbox and some very convention-driven/no-UI thinking for low friction blogging. Scribbles just has a simple web form to come at that problem, so it's just as "just start typing." 

Your precious content's long-term existence? There's an HTML exporter for now. 

This is resonating with me because I'm on a "sick of tools overthink" kick right now, and tools like this simply don't let you think much about them. 

I kinda like it. Maybe more later.