There are multiple lovely services available that allow everyone to set up a blog or website with ease and start publishing online. For example, Bear Blog is a privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform, Pika is a pretty, easy blogging platform from the folks at Good Enough, Telescope is a publishing platform with a focus on simplicity, speed, and privacy, and they all allow you to get started with a simple blog and publish your notes and thoughts.

People are capturing and writing down their notes and thoughts in all kinds of apps. Therefore, it is crucial being able to move whatever you have written from your preferred writing environment to the editor that powers your blog, with ease. Montaigne is a service that streamlines this process, as it is powered by Apple Notes.

With Monataigne you can create and set up a blog, website, or portfolio only by using Apple Notes. In case you are using Apple Notes to capture your notes and thoughts, and write your blog posts, and feel the urge to publish those to the vastness of the internet, you should take a closer look at Montaigne.

I started publishing my thoughts and ideas online over seven years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. It helped me building up a writing habit, by becoming a better writer I became a better thinker, I connected with other creative minds and brands, and landed my current job. Those are just my personal experiences, there are countless more benefits of writing and publishing online. It is always the right time to start a blog and have a personal internet corner. To get started with that, I appreciate tools and services like Montaigne.

Now let us take a closer look at Montaigne.

Getting to know Montaigne

Screenshot of the montaigne.io website, black font on white background

Montaigne got build by Anton and launched back in 2022. Anton built it out of the personal need to have a quick and easy way to create simple websites for his own projects and products. After not finding a tool that satisfied his needs, Anton decided to build a simple tool that works the way he needs, and follows as much principles (like no lock-in, open formats, no tracking, etc.) as possible. It is always lovely to see when a personal project that got build to solve a personal problem, turns into something that solves the problems of others too. And it is the dream of a lot of people to create a product that has the potential to be both useful and sustainable.

Setting up Montaigne is as easy as following only four steps. First, you create a dedicated folder in Apple Notes, this will be the home for everything you are planning to publish on your website or blog. Once that is done, you can sign up to Montaigne, create an account, and connect that specific folder. Since Montaigne natively integrates with Apple Notes, you can then start adding your notes to that folder. After that, everything gets published to web automatically. The folder that got connected to Montaigne is constantly shared with the service, which allows a hassle-free publishing process without ever leaving the app you already use to write your notes and posts. That is pretty much it to get your Montaigne site up and running. After that your personal internet corner is ready and reachable via a Montaigne sub-domain.

Structuring your site

Thanks to some neat formatting tricks, you can further customize the structure of your Montaigne site. In general, the website structure matches the structure of the Apple Notes folder that you connected to your Montaigne account. To create further sections on your website, like a blog, books you read, links you would like to share, or others, you can create subfolders for those sections, and all the notes you put into those subfolders become a part of those sections. By creating an „index“ note in your root folder, and a menu table inside that note, Montaigne renders a lovely side navigation on your website. Thanks to a selection of templates which you can copy to Apple Notes, you can quickly create and publish a Journal Note, a Book Review, or a Habit Tracker.

Since Montaigne is fully integrated with Apple Notes, you also get to benefit from Apple Notes features. For example, since Apple Notes features native collaboration capabilities, you can simply share the folder that you connected to Montaigne with your friends and colleagues and they can start making changes to the notes, or even add their owns which will then also get published to the website automatically.

Customization capabilities

By using metadata you can even further customize the general look and feel of your website. Metadata gives you all the control you need. If you want that the changes get applied globally, you need to change the metadata within your global "index" note. For example with the metadata "backgroundColor" you can change the background color of your website, but you can also customize the text color, link color, emojis, or the date format.

For the full rundown of how you can customize a Montaigne website to your needs and likings, make sure to check out the Montaigne docs, as they provide a great overview of its features, the roadmap, general FAQs, and guides to for example changing fonts, adding a page to your footer, share a folder on iOS, share notes on your iPhone, starting a newsletter, and a lot more.

Montaigne's pricing

Most of the features Montaigne is offering are free, which means you can create as many sites with it as you want, and the same applies to publishing notes and adding collaborators. For 5$ per month or $50 per year, you can upgrade to the Start Plan which will give you the possibility to add a custom domain to your website, and add newsletter support. The Pro Plan which is available for $12 per month or $120 per year includes everything from the Start Plan plus custom branding, full site search, and custom analytics. In case you just want to add a custom domain to your site, you can purchase that separately for $2 per month.

Who should use this?

I am not using Apple Notes, and I will not start using it because of Montaigne, simply because I have a solid system in place in a different app. I also already have a personal website and a personal blog. While my publishing process is not as streamlined as Montaigne's, it would involve way too much adaption at this point if I would decide to switch to Montaigne. But I could see myself using Montaigne for small and simple web projects.

However, who should use Montaigne?

I would say, Montaigne is a niche product, a superb niche product. For the longest time, I encouraged everyone I know to set up and create a personal website. People who are in the Apple ecosystem, using Apple Notes to capture thoughts and ideas, have no excuse anymore that setting up a personal website or blog and start publishing online is too complex. Montaigne makes the process of creating a personal website as easy as possible. I could still see people switching over to Apple Notes because of Montaigne, since the fact that you can literally stay within Apple Notes to write and publish sounds incredible powerful. There are other note-taking apps that support something similar, for example Obsidian and their Publish subscription which is available for $8 per month. However, that would mean to adopt a new tool that offers a lot more than Apple Notes, and people who simply want to publish might not want to spend time figuring out Obsidian.

Getting started with note-taking and writing within Apple Notes is frictionless. It is a default app installed on every single Apple device. Montaigne extends this frictionless behavior and transforms it onto creating a blog to get your thoughts out there. Obviously, if you are looking for a full-fledged CMS to power your publishing process, you probably should look for something else, but I can clearly see the use case for Montaigne when it comes to simple, minimalistic personal blogs, travel diaries, journals, book reviews, and other things within that realm. However, Montaigne is indeed capable of even creating portfolios.

So, if you like the minimal aesthetics of it, the ease of use, the simplicity, the Apple Notes integrations, make sure to give Montaigne a try. It is super fun to play around with it, and it is simply a lovely tool that allows everyone within the Apple ecosystem to quickly create a blog or a personal website.

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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