Show HN: Brick, a free Notion-like tool for zero-hassle site making

by neongreen • 6 years ago

187 101 6 years ago

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Author here — me and a friend have been working on Brick for the past several months.

It works like Notion as in "all your edits are instantly visible" — from experience, this feels very different from blogging on Wordpress or making a static site in a git repo.

I love static sites but I'm not going back to them. I can experiment much more easily with Brick.

You can do something similar with Notion, but Notion is aimed at management or personal knowledge-bases, and it shows. We have a different focus. E.g. Notion is unlikely to ever have email subscriptions or ways to let people pay for your writing, while we very well might in the future. Notion also doesn't support custom domains out of the box, or custom CSS.

Try it out! Brick is free and has no ads. The only thing is that you need a premium plan (less than $2/mo) for custom domains.

ellsthrow• 6 years ago

Looks good! How instant is instant? If I visit a site while he author is updating it will I see the text being added real time?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

will I see the text being added real time

No, only after a page refresh.

I think we won't have automatic page refresh because it gets complicated if the author e.g. decides to add a JS script to the page. But maybe not! Or maybe we'll add it for 99% of the users who don't embed JS into their pages.

mbo• 6 years ago

Hey, this is an awesome product!

I use Notion to maintain a personal knowledge-base (which it works great for). I also maintain a newsletter, embedded into the knowledge-base, that links directly into a lot of the knowledge-base pages for when I need to reference things (which it works not so great for).

Are there plans to introduce some sort of Notion-Brick interop/synchronisation system? I'd love to use the Brick styling and custom domain features, but would like to keep Notion as my source of truth.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

No plans to let you use Notion as the source of truth. Once Notion opens up their API, I expect something like that will appear very soon anyway.

glial• 6 years ago

Seems neat and easy! Is there any chance of equation support (like MathJax or something) in the future?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Definitely! There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in this area — what kind of widgets we support in the editor, what we can render, etc.

We prioritize feature requests from paying customers, so buying the $20/year plan is a good way to get MathJax significantly faster.

sreekotay• 6 years ago

Nice work. Actually working on something quite similar. Have you played with Roam research much?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Yeah. At least a month ago Roam was unusable for publishing. A page can take literally 5 min to load.

Roam also doesn't let you have several workspaces/databases, I think.

In my experience, I actually /want/ different things in my life (notes, diaries, public writing, etc) to be in different places. I even have several note-taking apps for different contexts, even though the feature sets are very similar.

I know that for some people, being able to have EVERYTHING in one place is an awesome feature. But for me and possibly others, it's the opposite.

adiM• 6 years ago

There is no info about pricing on the main page? I really don't want to sign in to see the pricing info and details of other features.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Added pricing!

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

FYI on Firefox on iOS your site renders a bit oddly - the sign in button in particular has text bottom aligned within its box.

brikwerk• 6 years ago

I'm also observing this behaviour[1] on the latest version of Safari as well.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/pDgXeJJ.png

isaacimagine2• 6 years ago

For some reason, the 'See brick in action' video won't play (Chromium, Android 10). Do you have another link to the video that might work?

isaacimagine2• 6 years ago

Other than that, the site looks pretty cool, and the idea is solid. I might give it a try ;)

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Hey — the video should work now. Say if it still doesn't.

haberdasher• 6 years ago

I can add a script tag via the CSS. I suppose it's not much of a security risk. Might be wrong though: https://brick.do/c9878660-42ed-4b95-93b6-10a761488b5a

firloop• 6 years ago

Oof. Depending on how they store authentication data, it might be possible to get someone's session token. Let's hope the cookies are "HttpOnly".

arkadiyt• 6 years ago

I suppose it's not much of a security risk.

It wouldn't be much of a security risk if the authors had correctly isolated user content into its own origin, which would have made this a self-xss only. As it stands the app itself runs on the same origin, so this is a real XSS.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Thanks! Isolating user content is the next task on the list — we discussed it internally just yesterday. Unfortunately, we didn't think we'll need it /that/ soon.

Long-term, we definitely need more security-minded folks on the team.

Short-term, I will add an email address in the footer so that such issues can at least be reported privately.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Deployed a fix. Thanks!

dzink• 6 years ago

In addition to the already highlighted security vulnerabilities (you have to stop any js injection capabilities), instant publish from your domain means you are about to be swarmed with spammers. From SEO back-link builders, to “download links” for viruses or illegal content, etc. If you enable that kind of spam, your domain’s signal to noise ratio goes down substantially for sharing legitimate content.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Right — we'll solve that problem once we have it. Do you know how other platforms (Wordpress, Notion, etc) handle it?

mmahemoff• 6 years ago

Start with separate subdomains using a wildcard DNS entry.

sagichmal• 6 years ago

Are you sure that's wise?

Spam and abuse aren't exactly minor problems for publishing platforms, they're arguably the primary existential threat, the most important thing to address. Preventing them is capital-H Hard, and not the kind of thing that can be easily retrofitted to an architecture that hasn't been designed with them in mind from the beginning...

input_sh• 6 years ago

The first step is to distance the domain of your project from the domain you use for user-generated content.

Examples: github.com vs. github.io, wordpress.org vs. wordpress.com (note that these are not subdomains, but distinct domains).

Doing so allows you to keep the two separate as far as SEO is concerned, so that your main project isn't affected regardless of what users might upload.

Then it's about putting out the fires whenever they appear.

I'd also be careful about JavaScript, since a site hosted on example.com/a will have the same origin as a site hosted on example.com/b (and therefore access to cookies). This is where a separate subdomain for each user comes in handy (so a.example.com vs b.example.com), which shouldn't be much of an issue since DNS providers usually have an API that you can call, and DNS updates should be fast when you're creating entries (as opposed to modifying existing ones).

amerine• 6 years ago

Two examples:

1) Mine, Heroku, we host your applications on the herokuapp.com zone not heroku.com. Putting customer sites on heroku.com would open that zone up for the kind of de-valuing the OP suggested.

2) Look at Github, githubusercontent.com is where your uploaded files are served from, not github.com. For the same reasons.

alphagrep12345• 6 years ago

The only question I have is, If I make a personal website using this, will it show up on google when people search for my name?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Yes, all pages are indexable once Google gets ahold of the links (so if you never share the link with anyone, it's /not/ going to end up in Google — that's important).

I can find my Brick sites when I search for my name, though they are low-rank at the moment.

mamurphy• 6 years ago

I can't seem to read anything at all about pricing without signing up. I don't want to share my Google/Github account with you before seeing pricing information.

The "see Brick in action" video also doesn't play for me on Firefox.

jentist_retol• 6 years ago

share my Google/Github account

however, it's extremely frustrating that the pricing isn't up front or even indicated that'll be an issue

lopsidedBrain• 6 years ago

It does, in that it's much easier for me sign up with a throwaway username. It's also part of the reason HN doesn't require these SSO integrations.

whois_anon• 6 years ago

Just logged in to have a look. Pricing plans are: free up to 2 domains and “for the first 1000 users” $20/year for 20 domains or using your custom domain.

fareesh• 6 years ago

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ITZQHyGMdlK2DJ6KyDYMf8rfU67...

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Thanks! Will be fixed.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

Is there a reason these types of sites are trendy now? I am seeing a new note taking/microblogging site every day now on Hacker News.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Not a microblogging site — we are pretty heavily geared towards true "sites" (places where you write long-form content, organize it, edit often, etc) rather than tweeting into the void.

kkarpkkarp• 6 years ago

neongreen, you should really test how it works on Firefox. For example sing in with Github bricked (pun intended ;) ) my tab with your site, even refresh button and address bar stopped working. I had to close it and open again to see the dashboard.

Steps:

- click on "get started"

- I choose option to sing in with google.

- it opens google api in separate modal window and this does not work if you have Firefox extension to keep google in container

- so I clicked github option, and authorized your app

- after that, brick.do page has been frozen completely

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Thanks! Yeah, definitely need to test on Firefox (as well as Safari).

spyckie2• 6 years ago

lots of questions / comments:

- how do I publish? how do I see the published version?

- what does the eye at the top right do?

- Is all you can do right now just create pages and subpages of rich media?

Otherwise it's actually not a bad experience. Lots of bugs. not sure if I'll stick around or publish an article on it yet, hard to tell right now.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

You don't publish! Every page you write is already available at the URL you see in your address bar. This said, it's not indexable or findable until you yourself share it somewhere. UUIDs are long enough to be unguessable.

The eye at the top switches the page into preview mode, which is currently very similar to the edit mode. You'll notice the difference if you use Twitter embeds.

All you can do right now is create pages and subpages of rich media, true. Surprisingly, this was already enough for me to start writing much more than I used to before Brick. But we have more features coming, of course (collaborative editing, etc — see the bottom of the landing page).

vishnuharidas• 6 years ago

I still want to see some example pages that are done in Brick. Also want to see the pricing details before I sign up. Currently "Sign In" is the only option available there.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Gotcha.

Sample pages:

* https://brick.do/55357459-86b9-4274-8ae4-85721987d73d — a friend wrote a post about webs of meaning

* https://brick.do/7c494481-f2e5-4a05-9a4d-19b22c76c729 — my own post detailing all my projects so far

* https://brick.do/ca51f14c-e600-4afe-b99d-71e46fbd150b — a technical post (Haskell-y) that I wrote

* https://nathanabram.com/ — this is how the default style looks like.

brainbag• 6 years ago

FYI the third link (Haskell-y) has a "too many redirects" error on iOS 13 Safari.

replwoacause2• 6 years ago

Should this worry me as a potential premium customer? ———————————————————————————-

I am Artyom Kazak, aka @availablegreen on Twitter. I was born in Belarus, a small Eastern European country, and lived there till 18. ... I am turning 25 in October 2020, and that is when I plan to quit coding—as a birthday gift to myself.

rawoke083600• 6 years ago

Nice site. With all the "focus" on micro-blogging and dislike for sites like Medium.com (I agree by the way). It might be a good show of faith, to let the users "export" their sites to MD or static HTML, if they want to host and have a copy of their website.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Exporting is on the roadmap. Currently you can `wget` your own site, but that's not a great solution.

leoncvlt• 6 years ago

Nice work - seems like more and more people are using Notion to publish their own little websites. There are a few custom solutions that attempt to fix the problems that the author outlined, such as custom URLs and styling:

- https://super.so/

- https://fruitionsite.com/

- https://www.notion.so/Hosting-Potion-Fast-custom-domains-for...

I also built my own solution which takes a different approach: https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion - it caches the Notion page as a static site - admittedly you lose the capability of "syncing" sites instantly but is also makes the site snappier and more responsive as it removes a lot of bloat.

GekkePrutser• 6 years ago

I also built my own solution which takes a different approach: https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion - it caches the Notion page as a static site - admittedly you lose the capability of "syncing" sites instantly but is also makes the site snappier and more responsive as it removes a lot of bloat.

Nice work! Another benefit you didn't mention is that it also makes it a lot more secure - there's no injecting anything into static pages!

desireco42• 6 years ago

Hey thanks for posting this. I didn't know people do this. I think idea to use Notion for publishing is something that I would enjoy and will give it a try.

eddyg• 6 years ago

This looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing. In a quick test on Mobile Safari with the demo site, it doesn’t seem to render a “mobile friendly” version... and worse I can’t scroll left/right. I’ll check a different device to make sure and can an open an issue with more details.

raju• 6 years ago

I am seeing this as well. I raised an issue on Github.

phemartin• 6 years ago

I've launched a similar product a while ago that turns documents into websites[0]. Perhaps that might also be interesting to you.

[0] https://magicdocs.co

Jibranio• 6 years ago

Awesome work!

therealmarv• 6 years ago

No imprint, no privacy rules, no terms of service. Big no from me.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Gotcha.

Do you have an example of a small service with excellent privacy/TOS rules? So that I know what to treat as a high-quality exemplar when designing privacy/TOS rules for Brick.

dancek2• 6 years ago

I expected "free" to mean free software. It means freemium here.

EDIT: NOTE: I mean nothing negative by freemium: I just mean there are both free and paid tiers. Not sure what the definition of freemium is.

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

How is it better than Notion then?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Right now, Notion will work just as well for you if you don't mind using a third-party service for custom domains, styling, etc.

In the future, Notion and Brick will drift away significantly. Notion is unlikely to have E2E encrypted pages. Notion is unlikely to have built-in support for newsletters, especially paid newsletters a la Substack. Notion is unlikely to get built-in analytics. Etc.

Notion is powerful enough that you can use it as a pretty good writing platform, but swimming against the flow is always harder. Notion's flow, the way it seems to me, is management and knowledge bases. Ie. it's primarily for co-workers, and it is good for writers insofar as co-workers have to be writers sometimes.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

We have paid features, right.

I thought "freemium" nowadays referred more to practices like "we'll actively make your experience worse and annoy you unless you pay", but now I think I mistook that for "free-to-play" in the game industry. Alright then! It's freemium.

dancek2• 6 years ago

I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the term. I mean absolutely no offense. I understand freemium as proprietary service with both free and paid tiers.

chdaniel• 6 years ago

It's Notion-like, but did you build the blocks editor from scratch or is there any open-source option for Notion's block-based editor?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

We are not using a block editor (I think blocks are worse for writing than the traditional model).

The only open-source block editor I know of is https://codex.so/editor.

pjgalbraith• 6 years ago

Gutenberg is also open source and built by WordPress.

edwinyzh• 6 years ago

So looks mine is on the right track:) https://docxmanager.com

jonathanliu3• 6 years ago

Noob question: if I share a brick URL, can it be traced back to my github, or my personal identity in any way by the people that I sent it to?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

It's designed not to leak any info like that. Anonymity is super important (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/23/being-your-selves-iden... is one of the inspirations for what I want Brick to enable.)

If you find any way to circumvent that, we'll treat it with the same priority as we treat security issues.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Note that if you share a page from a subtree, the reader will see its parents as well, but not siblings.

I.e.

    a
    b
     b2 <- if you share this, 'b' is visible, but 'a' isn't

jonathanliu3• 6 years ago

Good to know, thanks!

Edit: Also thanks for sharing that RF article. Great read.

samblr• 6 years ago

Looks like a really good idea. Will be trying this week.

tiffanyh3• 6 years ago

Can we stop the requirement to use Gmail or Github just so I can use your service?

I want to signup for this service, but I can’t - because I use a non-gmail email service and use a non-github Git service.

What happened to thr “good old days” of just using my email address to signup for a service?

xxdesmus• 6 years ago

Completely agree. I closed the tab as soon as I saw those were the only 2 signup options.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

We want to have a classic sign-up option as well, sure — if only because it's one less third-party point of vulnerability for users (will be relevant when encrypted pages are there).

Unfortunately it's harder than Google/GitHub login, so we focused on other bits for the MVP.

Is there any third-party service you /would/ use for auth? Perhaps it can be enabled quickly.

tiffanyh3• 6 years ago

No.

I purposely don’t tie my account credentials to a 3rd party.

(Which always seemed crazy to me that people would do. Especially business accounts)

EDIT: why am I getting downvotes for this comment? I’d rather you reply to this comment to create a health dialogue on this topic if you have an opinion - rather than just some random downvote without reason.

tghw• 6 years ago

An email/password login is not difficult in the least.

And, frankly, there is zero chance I'm going to host a site with a provider who thinks it is.

sub7• 6 years ago

Please take my advice if you want this thing to last.

Add payment/subscription support for writers. Take on substack directly.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

This is planned!

dafman2• 6 years ago

Not sure if it's just me, but playing the 'See Brick in action' video in Firefox results in some strange behaviour: https://imgur.com/y0zJ0gB

vhbit• 6 years ago

do you use webrender?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Replaced with a better-encoded video (VLC meh, Handbrake yay). Give it another try.

dafman2• 6 years ago

Works perfectly now!

gverrilla• 6 years ago

The website doesn't work here, which is pretty unusual. win 10 with latest version of firefox. first time it wouldn't completely load (kept loading...), CTRL+R and it loads completely, but video won't play. I'm curious and will be back in a few days to check it out.

neongreen36• 6 years ago

first time it wouldn't completely load

Hey! Can't reproduce on vanilla Firefox. Do you have any extensions enabled? Try "Help -> Restart with Add-ons Disabled".

If it works (or if it doesn't even), can you write me at artyom@artyom.me and tell about the results? Perhaps this can be fixed from our side.

About the video — it plays for me, but poorly. Will take a look.

replwoacause2• 6 years ago

Looks nice! Any plans to add syntax highlighting to the code blocks?

neongreen36• 6 years ago

Definitely!

Currently we prioritize feature requests from paying users, and nobody asked for syntax highlighting yet. When somebody does, I think it'll appear pretty soon.

Show HN: Brick, a free Notion-like tool for zero-hassle site making

Related Stories