Roon: The New Kid
You've heard of Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress, all big names in the world of blogging platforms. These are all great for providing a rich blog experience for readers. However, if you don't need free or cheap hosting of your media-rich blog with a fancy theme, there are other options.
Medium is one, created by the founders of Twitter. Unfortunately, you can't check it out yet. They are slowly rolling the platform out to users, so it might be a while. Ghost is another soon-to-be-released platform. But you want to try it out for yourself, don't you? Give Roon a try: easy to use; simple; and compatible across multiple devices.
About Roon
This free blog hosting platform really is a breeze to use. Just sign up for a free account by choosing a username and password, and you're taken to the minimalistic dashboard. Start drafting posts if you wish by clicking the ‘+' button.
You'll notice that the toolbar is at the bottom of the draft post. It's typical formatting stuff — bold, italic, underline, highlight) and also the option to add images to your blog posts and create subheadings.
If you prefer to manually insert code to format your posts (some don't like to take their fingers off of the keyboard to bold something), use the following: **Bold**; *Italic*; _Underline_; ==Highlighted==; and # Heading. Obviously, you don't type ‘bold' or ‘italic', just the text you want bolded or italicized.
The dashboard consists of two columns. On one side is a list of all of your posts still in draft form, and the other side features all published posts. You are able to save any post as a draft to return to it later. Want to delete a post? Open it in the backend and click the trashcan icon located at the bottom of the post.
Considerations
Something you may not realize or be used to, especially if you have had experience on other platforms, is that when drafting your blog post in Roon, a line break in the backhand does not display a line break in your actual post viewers will see. If you want the text to be on the next line, you need to hit enter twice.
At the top of your post in draft form, you can insert a header image to sit above your blog post using an image button. According to Roon, you should use a 2000px image in order to make it responsive across all devices. Also at the top of the draft window: save, publish, and preview buttons (looks like an eyeball, how cute!)
Settings
As previously stated, this is minimalistic. As such, the settings are limited. You can check out the personal settings first, updating your name, bio information, email address, Twitter username, and one website URL.
There is another tab for blog settings. Here, you can configure custom domain settings (which, by the way, costs $12 per year), choose a blog title, select between two different fonts (like I said, minimalistic), change color, and the best feature, export your blog. This means if Roon closes shop, your blog posts aren't lost forever!
Give Roon a try if you are looking for a way to allow users to focus on your writing rather than flashy icons and designs!
What is your blogging platform of choice?
