Features

BirchCamp works like the social apps you already know, minus the parts that make them exhausting. Here is what writers and readers get, and what we deliberately left out.

A profile that is also a blog

Every writer gets an address of their own at /your-handle/. It opens like a social profile: a cover banner, a portrait, a short bio, an optional link to your own website, and real numbers only, namely how many posts you have published, how many categories you use and when you joined.

Below the header sits a pinned intro that you write yourself. Use it to welcome readers, list your best pieces or point to the places you publish elsewhere. Then comes your timeline of posts, newest first, with pages for older work.

One shared feed

The home page is a newsfeed of everything published on BirchCamp, newest at the top. There is no ranking algorithm deciding who gets seen. A writer who joined yesterday appears in the same stream as one who has posted for a year. Readers scroll, open what catches their eye and move on.

Camps for every topic

Posts carry topics such as travel, cooking or football. Each topic opens a camp page that pulls together posts from every writer on the site. Inside your own profile you can also file posts under categories, so a long archive stays easy to browse.

Posts that read well

• Cover images that sit on the post card in the feed and at the top of the post.
• A table of contents built from your section headings, so long guides stay easy to navigate.
• Images inside posts, hosted on the site itself.
• Full support for Vietnamese and other accented text, in a typeface chosen for it.
• Ordinary links. Link to your sources and to your own website the normal way.

Replies without accounts

Readers reply with a name and a comment. Nobody has to sign up or share an email address. Each reply waits for a moderator before it appears; replies that are never approved are deleted automatically after 30 days. Writers can join their own threads, and their replies carry an Author badge.

Following, the open way

The Follow button on a profile is an RSS feed. Readers paste it into any feed reader and get new posts as they come, without a BirchCamp account and without us knowing who follows whom. The whole site has a feed too, at /feed.xml.

Fast and plain under the hood

Pages are rendered on the server as plain HTML and CSS. They load quickly on a phone with a weak signal, work without JavaScript and look the same in every modern browser. Readers get no cookies, and there are no ads, analytics or tracking pixels.

What we left out on purpose

• No like counters, follower counts or view counts.
• No public sign-up. Writers join by invitation, which keeps the camps small and the feed readable.
• No direct messages and no notifications competing for your attention.

Want to write here? Ask through the contact page and choose Joining as a writer. The help page answers the common questions.