Broadside

Broadside is for people who would rather own their blog rather than rent it. Your posts are markdown files in a folder on your own server. Not rows in somebody else's database. Not entries in a service that might get bought or shut down in eighteen months. You can open them in any text editor, back them up the way you back up everything else, and if you ever want to leave, you copy a folder. That is the entire exit plan.

This app is how you write posts from your phone.

MONEY, ADVERTISING AND YOUR PRIVACY

The app is free. The software behind it is free. There is no subscription, no upgrade, no pro tier, and nothing is held back for a later paid version. There are no advertising, and there never will be. There is no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier and no third-party code of any kind in it. This is not a promise about handling your data carefully. It is simpler than that: the app talks to your server and to nothing else. There is nowhere else for anything to go, and I run no servers that could collect it even if I wanted to.

Your blog, your data, your way!

The app does not read your photo library either. It uses the standard iOS picker, so the only pictures it sees are the ones you hand it.

The server, this app, and the setup instructions are all open source under the MIT licence.

BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD

You need a Broadside server of your own. There is no hosted version and no account to create. Broadside is free and open-source software that you run yourself, on a home server, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi in a cupboard, or the cheapest VPS you can find. It is one small program and it needs no database. Once it is running, you type your site's address into this app, paste in a token, and you are writing.

Broadside is available on Docker and Git.
https://hub.docker.com/r/noxegenus/broadside
https://github.com/xer0-1ne/broadside

If you do not have a server, this app will not do anything useful yet. Better that you know now than after downloading it.

WRITING

The editor uses a block-style approach and can be organized and sorted while editing. Blocks are: paragraphs, a heading, quotes, lists, pictures, and code. Drag and drop to change the order or change a paragraph into a quote and the words come with it. Underneath it is all ordinary Markdown. Write a post on your laptop in a text editor, open it here, and it comes back exactly as you left it, tables and all. Nothing is quietly rewritten.

PICTURES

Add one photograph and it is a photograph. Add a second and it becomes a gallery your readers can swipe through. No extra plugins or complexities. Lightbox is built in. Uploads keep going after you leave the app. That sounds minor until you are sending a very large image over a home connection and want to put your phone back in your pocket.

DRAFTS AND SCHEDULING

You can save posts as a draft and edit it later (on your phone or the web). You can set the time and date for the post into the future, and it will post automatically.