Pen.io is now probably the most minimalist blog platform on the Web

Earlier this year we covered Pen.io, a super-simple way of publishing pages of text to the Web. A subtle recent addition to the service has turned it into probably the most minimalist blogging platform it’s possible to have.

Until now you could set up pages of text, hosted on Pen.io, and share the URLs with others. Text could then be edited on the fly without entering any kind of back-end – because there was no back-end. It was just a simple way of getting text online without any hassle. However, now the Australia-based service has rolled out user accounts.

Sign up for an account and you’ll get a homepage from which anyone can see all your Pen.io pages. This also acts as the way to add new pages, or to access existing ones to edit. Adding an image is as simple as dragging and dropping it onto the page, while YouTube videos can be embedded with a simple text tag. Another tag allows you to turn individual posts into multi-page epics.

If you want to add a link, you’ll have to just paste in the URL – you can’t have anchor text for it. That’s a little inelegant, but the whole point here is minimalism. If you want to share your posts, there’s an embed code to post them directly up anywhere you like.

Pen.io isn’t really intended as a blogging platform per se, and it obviously lacks many of the features that users of WordPress, Tumblr and the like are used to – it even lacks RSS feeds – but if you want to try the most lightweight form of blogging possible, this is it.

➤ Pen.io