I built a shared blog for my wife and me. How do you keep a personal tool small?
My wife and I have blogged about our trips for ten years. We both had photos and videos on our phones, but one person had to collect them and assemble the entry.
I wrote Texttile so we could work on it together. One person writes, the other follows live and sorts the gallery. We can pass the text editor back and forth.
I kept it small: one Docker container, SQLite, and everyone with an account is an admin. No permission matrix or plugin system.
A developer on r/elixir has already asked whether permissions will come later. They are building something closer to a full editorial workflow. That is a useful question, but a different use case from our travel blog.
If you have turned a personal tool into a product, what evidence made you expand beyond your own workflow?
Project and source: https://www.texttile.blog
Original story: https://www.v01.io/posts/2026/08/texttile/
So far, our own travel blog is still the strongest signal. The permissions question was one developer asking, not a pattern of users hitting the same limit.
I’m sharing Texttile now to find out who else actually needs this workflow. Until I see that, I’d rather keep it small than turn it into a general-purpose CMS.
The permission request is useful feedback, but not necessarily evidence of a broader market. Have users outside your own workflow repeatedly asked for capabilities you deliberately excluded, or is the two-person travel-blog use case still the strongest signal?