If you want to learn about new features right when we release them, please join our Slack chat! You can also chat with the Brick team there and propose new features β you might end up in our Hall of fame if you do.
In July, we were mostly busy handling our SaaS Mantra deal campaign, helping users and handling issues. Plus a bunch of work under the hood, like "building tools for preventing phishing".
The biggest user-visible feature from July is signup by email. Other signup methods (Google, GitHub) aren't going away either.
We also have a public roadmap now.
Quality-of-life improvements:
In June, we have finished implementing personal and collaborative workspaces β they are now in beta phase. They look like this:
We also added a way to specify whether you want links to open in a new tab or not β you might have noticed the checkbox in the link dialog.
Finally β we have a privacy policy and terms of service now.
In May, we were busy working on team workspaces. They should be ready in June β stay tuned. We also plan to do a collaboration with SaaS Mantra and offer "pay once, use forever" Brick plans.
Otherwise, we made a few small improvements:
In April, we were working on making Brick nicer to use overall:
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we were using for every page, so now services like Instapaper and Pocket work with Brick-made sites.We also have a few social things going: there is a hall of fame where we keep track of everyone who contributed ideas and made Brick better, and there is a Calendly link that you can use to book a call with us if you want to chat about anything. Both of those live in the "Help and feedback" menu.
We have also expanded our scope a bit, and now we aim to serve three different usecases: public notes or documentation, personal/small-scale sites/blogs, and team wikis. So, in May we are going to work on covering the last point β bringing team workspaces to Brick. If you are interested in this usecase, please contact us!
We also added a menu ("Help and feedback") with links to the help pages, the Slack chat (where you can ask for help while we are asleep!), and our Indie Hackers blog. If you have ideas for anything else that could be useful there β please tell us.
Also, there is a 50% student discount for the premium plan now. Write in the support chat and we will send you a promo code.
In February, we have released two huge features β collaboration and themes. Please try them out!
If you are on the premium plan, you can invite anybody with a Brick account to collaborate on your pages in real time. Like in Google Docs. Look for the "Collaboration" button in the page toolbar:
It has always been possible to create custom CSS for your pages β but still sufficiently tricky that many people stayed with the default theme. So we made two more themes, and plan to add many more in the future. Look for the "Design" button in the page toolbar:
In January, we have fixed some bugs and improved existing features while working on the grand release of collaboration. It's not ready yet, but will be soon.
We have weekly backups for premium users now β head to settings and check "Weekly backups".
Of course, we keep backups of all your data anyway β but having your own backups is still useful. And of course, you can request an export of your data even if you aren't on the premium plan. We have no intention to be a walled garden.
We also greatly expanded code highlighting. Here is the full list of languages we support now: Agda, Bash, C, C#, C++, Clojure, CSS, Dhall, Diff, Dockerfile, Elm, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, Julia, Kotlin, LaTeX, Lisp, Lua, Nix, OCaml, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PureScript, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, SQL, Swift, TOML, TypeScript, XML, YAML.
Ping us if you need a language that is not on the list!
Finally, if you post a link to a Brick page on Twitter (or on Facebook, or in a bunch of other places), it now shows a card. In the future we'll add a way to add images and custom descriptions to the cards β stay tuned.
One of the most requested features was pretty URLs for pages (instead of long random IDs). This is a must-have feature if you are migrating a personal site to Brick, so we have added this. And Notion still doesn't have this. Take that, Notion!
For instance, if you have a personal site at jane.me, now your links can look like jane.me/about, jane.me/contact, etc, instead of jane.me/9d92c83e-cf01-44e0-af7c-ddbb0b0e66d5 or whatever.
Go the menu and click "Custom link". Boom. (Works only for subdomains and custom domains.)
We already have custom CSS β you can customize your pages' design however you want β but we didn't have custom HTML. Now we do. You can put any HTML whatsoever anywhere on your page. (The only restriction so far is that it should be a separate block, but at some point we'll have inline HTML too.)
With custom HTML, you can embed videos from anywhere, or a Spotify playlist, or a Google calendar. You can hotlink images and make image comparisons. You can add JS-based interactive demonstrations. And finally, you can have text floating across the page with the <marquee> tag β this was the first thing I tried out when HTML embedding went live.
HTML embedding lives in the ΒΆ button: