Pagecord is now open source 🤓

The source code for Pagecord is now freely available under the MIT license. I retain copyright of the Pagecord brand, but the source code can be used by anyone, for anything, at any time. 

I built Pagecord to offer the simplest way of publishing writing online, with a great reading experience on any device, free of ads, trackers and clutter. It was never intended to be an all-singing, all-dancing, replacement for Wordpress or Ghost, or even Bear Blog – just a calm reading and writing experience for people with simple needs, backed by as little Ruby code as possible. I think it meets that goal today.

Since I removed the free tier, user numbers are low. Embarassingly so. I would like more people to use Pagecord (otherwise, why bother!), so perhaps giving the code back to the community will provide a level of trust in the product that encourages more people to try it, and ultimately stick with it. Time will tell. It may be that I bring back the free plan and enlist help to keep the spammers at bay, your thoughts on this would be welcomed.

There's no active roadmap for Pagecord so I'm not currently looking for active contributors, although bug fixes and code improvements are welcomed of course. In time  I will look for someone (ideally an active customer!) to share the load with, especially on the infrastructure side of things. One thing I do intend to do is add an export feature, because vendor lock-in is on my mind a lot. Perhaps the community has some bright ideas for how to make a Pagecord blog as portable as possible? 

In the meantime, please do take a look at the code (it's all built with Ruby on Rails) and definitely try out the app – I'd love to know what you think of it all, and where I might take it.

-- Olly