Simple, honest tools for the small web.

Hi there 👋🏻. I'm Kev Quirk, and Pure Commons is home to the simple tools I build for the web.

Pure Commons is my way of building honest, lightweight software for the small web.

I'm a big believer in personal publishing, owning your own data, and being able to write whatever you want, wherever you want. But over the years, I've become increasingly frustrated by how complicated and bloated self-hosting can be. So I started building my own, simple tools.

It all began in 2022 with Simple.css — a classless CSS framework designed to make plain semantic HTML look good without any fuss. Simple.css became very sucessful, gaining thousands of stars on GitHub and users all over the world. Clearly other people were looking for these simple tools too.

Next, I built Hyde: a really simple content management system for my Jekyll blog. Hyde was just a personal experiment to make my publishing workflow easier. But while tinkering with it, I decided I also wanted a lightweight commenting system that worked the same way. That experiment eventually turned into Pure Comments.

Once Hyde and Pure Comments were up and running, I wanted to go a step further. Instead of just building one-off tools for myself, I decided to build a little family of software for the small web. These are tools that can be used together, or completely on their own.

That led to Pure Blog, a simple PHP blogging engine. At that point I decided to put these projects under one roof and Pure Commons was born.

Everything I build under the Pure Commons banner follows a few basic rules:

I'm constantly tweaking these tools and thinking up new ones. If you're a fan of the small web, I hope you find something useful here.

If you find these tools useful, please consider buying me a coffee on Ko-fi. It's always good to support open source projects. Plus, it's a huge motivator that spurs me on to keep building. I'd be incredibly grateful for the nod. ❤️