Building a no/low code blogging platform with a twist

Okay so this is my first post here on idie hackers but I thought it would be an interesting way to get some feedback on my side project and keep me accountable. Anyway, onto the building!

Recently I've been writing a lot more for the startup I've co-founded >> standfearless.io
I've really been enjoying it and it has yielded some great results (not just traffic but also higher engagement and seemingly more trust with our customers which is awesome!). The only problem with this is that I'm somewhat restricted in what I can/can't write. Plus the content is attached to STAND and not to me personally, which means if it fails or I move on to another project some of that content will be lost.

So in an effort to widen my writing topics and do some writing for me and my online life I decided I wanted to do what everyone else does; create a Medium account. I was sitting on this for a bit until I had a great chat with a friend of mine, Charles Bardett (workshoptactics.com), who showed me his personal blog (chxrles.com) which he had built using Kirby.

Charles' blog is really nice and clean, and I'm a big fan of minimalism! This turned me away from Medium and I decided I wanted to host my own blog. But it couldn't have been that easy, I also wanted to make things a little unusual or interesting..... After playing about with a few wild ideas and sketches I settled on a Tinder/Email sorting concept. Basically you get a list of posts lined up and you can swipe left/right depending on what you want to do with them. I haven't worked out the specifics just yet but you get the idea.....I hope.

I'm a big fan of no/low code platforms. Mainly because I've always struggled with code and they allow me to build quickly. Recently my platform of choice for building websites has been Webflow. It's very easy to use and grasp and there's a great community of builders online that are doing cool and weird things with it. I'm sure there are better platforms out there for different things but I really enjoy using it, and as this side project is intended for fun I want to use something I enjoy to build it!

Webflow alone is enough to create a simple blog CMS but I want to complicate things further and offer up this style of swappable blog to others as a subscription package at the same price as a comparable Webflow sub. Not sure if anyone wants that but my thinking is if I'm making it for myself I may as well stick it out there for others to try and potentially cover my costs or make a bit of money.

Hoping to document the journey here and hopefully learn some stuff as I go, check out www.flicblog.com for live and v beta progress. I also plan to make the project fully clonable for any fellow Webflow-ers that want to duplicate.

Let me know what you think and tell me if you think this is dumb or interesting!

Credit for dark mode toggle >> https://blog.prototypr.io/how-i-added-persistent-dark-mode-in-webflow-23c34815b5a2