Pagecord lets you effortlessly post by email. You don't have to worry about a slow, non-mobile-first, bloated interface and third party plugins that bog you down (I am looking at you, WordPress). Writing naturally through your email composer should encourage you to write more often. A neat trick is using the Apple iOS Mail app's link previewfeature.

YouTube shared video links and Spotify songs are automatically embedded. The composer is feature-rich (has everything you need and most importantly nothing that you don't need). I understand Olly is working on a new, upgraded interface.

Quoted text looks gorgeous if you are obsessive like me, and want things precisely as you envision.

Posts can be displayed as a stream of complete entries one after the other (with nothing for your readers to click through to read further), cards like those on Hey World, or a list of posts if that is your preference.

Your blog looks great on mobile, and I love the endless scroll of posts, replacing the need to click on page 2. You can add a static ‘about’ page too if you desire.

Pagecord offers gorgeous themes to choose from, along with a stunning dark mode! I love the monospaced font with maximum content width.

Olly takes feature requests and rolls out what makes sense promptly. For example, he rolled out canonical tags for posts overnight when I requested.

Additionally, I was excited that he rolled out tags, as my blog is full of spontaneous ramblings and lacks a niche.

Longevity of such platforms is another aspect you need to consider. If they shut down or if you change your mind in the future (it happens), there is an easy export feature to take your content elsewhere.

As a premium user ($29 per year),

• you can point your custom domain,

• have a mailing list (goes out once a week),

• reply to comments from users by email,

• collect post likes,

• have page analytics (without invading your readers' privacy),

• and, most importantly, attach images to your posts.

Please give the (more than generous) free version a spin, and you will not be disappointed!

I started thinking I would do long-form, well-researched, infrequent, high-quality posts over quantity. But I end up doing much more spontaneous microblogging than I anticipated. And I have fun doing so! Psst.. It’s the ease of this service.

My annual renewal is coming up in a month, and you bet that I would continue being an avid supporter of this independent platform!