Hello everyone, now seems like a good time to finally tell you all about Pillowfort.io, a blogging platform that I (juliabaritz) and vaguestblogging have been working on for a while. Basically, we wanted to start a new blogging platform that takes our favorite features from sites we’ve used like Tumblr and LiveJournal, and create the best kind of blogging platform we could think of. Our goals for Pillowfort are to create a place where fans and creators alike can share their work, create a community of their own, and do so in a positive and safe environment.
On Pillowfort you’ll be able to run a personal blog similar to how Tumblr blogs operate, but also create communities similar to the ones that LiveJournal features, so that you can easily share content with people who share your tastes and interests. We’re also working on privacy features like blocking users, the ability to make posts rebloggable or un-rebloggable, and creating privacy lists so that your posts will only be visible to certain users. In the next few weeks, we’ll have more detailed posts about what Pillowfort is going to look like and what features we’ll be including, but above are a couple screenshots from the current state of the site so you can see what we’re going for.
We want to get the word out, so share this post if you would be interested in using a site like this so we can get an idea of how many people are interested! This site would also be a very large undertaking for us to attempt to finish ourselves, so we would love for people who would be interested in helping us with the programming to contact us and let us know that you’re interested. The app is built on Rails and currently deployed on Heroku (using Postgres for the database), so a familiarity with Rails and PSQL is greatly preferred.
It’s strange to go back to our very first announcement, when Pillowfort.io was just a dream and a little demo. Now it’s been live for over a year with almost 4,500 members! We’re aiming to expand our community much further, so check out our latest informational post about the site and sign up for the 4th wave of beta registrations if you’re interested in joining!
