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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

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 6y 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?
- neongreen 6y 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.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    I'm a DB guy not an HTMLer. >> It works like Notion as in "all your edits are instantly visible" but then > No, only after a page refresh. Which is pretty much what would happen with a static site, no? Edit, save, refresh, visible. Because even I've done that. (BTW I fully respect your JS orientation but as someone who's going to have to start a blog soon but without JS I won't be able to use your stuff).
    - neongreen 6y ago
      > Edit, save, refresh, visible. Without the "save" step. This is I meant by saying "instant".
mbo 6y 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.
- neongreen 6y 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 6y ago
Seems neat and easy! Is there any chance of equation support (like MathJax or something) in the future?
- neongreen 6y 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 6y ago
Nice work. Actually working on something quite similar. Have you played with Roam research much?
- neongreen 6y 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.
  - Jefro118 6y ago
    Just to let you know both of those issues have been solved with Roam, although page loads are still not super fast. You can have multiple workspaces now too but they've started charging for that I believe.
adiM 6y 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.
- neongreen 6y ago
  Added pricing!

ellsthrow 6y 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?

neongreen 6y 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.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I'm a DB guy not an HTMLer. >> It works like Notion as in "all your edits are instantly visible" but then > No, only after a page refresh. Which is pretty much what would happen with a static site, no? Edit, save, refresh, visible. Because even I've done that. (BTW I fully respect your JS orientation but as someone who's going to have to start a blog soon but without JS I won't be able to use your stuff).
  - neongreen 6y ago
    > Edit, save, refresh, visible. Without the "save" step. This is I meant by saying "instant".

mbo 6y 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.

neongreen 6y 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 6y ago

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

neongreen 6y 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 6y ago

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

neongreen 6y 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.
- Jefro118 6y ago
  Just to let you know both of those issues have been solved with Roam, although page loads are still not super fast. You can have multiple workspaces now too but they've started charging for that I believe.

adiM 6y 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.

neongreen 6y ago
Added pricing!