I built Kerouac: GitHub contributions for writers

New from Westenberg

Once upon a commit, someone looked at GitHub’s little green squares and thought: what if writers had that?

That someone was me!

And the app is called Kerouac.

For the last year, I’ve been building a writing studio that takes publishing seriously.

If you write online, you already know the pain: your work is everywhere.

A Substack from your current era, a Ghost blog from the one before that, a Medium publication, a personal site you keep meaning to revive, maybe even a YouTube script or two. Your body of work is scattered across the internet, and your motivation is just as scattered. You can’t see the pattern. You can’t feel the streak. You definitely can’t tell whether this year was better than last year.

Kerouac is my answer to that.

What Kerouac actually is

At its heart, Kerouac is a 365-day heatmap of your publishing life.

Connect Substack, Ghost, Medium, Micro.blog, YouTube, any RSS feed, and Kerouac pulls in everything you’ve ever published and shows where you shipped, where you went quiet, how long your streaks are, and what your actual rhythm looks like.

I wanted the dashboard to be the dashboard: a single view that tells you, at a glance, whether you’re keeping the promise you made to yourself.

Behind the heatmap you get:

• Daily and weekly streaks

• At-risk countdowns when a streak is about to break

• A Friday email that gently panics you if a 2+ week streak is in danger

• Insights that read like a story, not a report: words written, weekday habits, platform mix, quiet stretches, and year-over-year pace

For the first time, I can see my own writing as a practice, not just a list of posts.

But it’s not only a rearview mirror

Tracking is nice. Shipping is better.

So Kerouac is also a drafting studio. There’s an idea inbox for the half-thoughts that usually disappear before you can use them. A kanban board for running your blog like a pipeline: Idea → To Do → Drafting → Editing → Reviewing → Scheduled → Published. And a Markdown editor with a built-in research shelf for links, notes, images, and quote snippets you can drag straight into the draft.

I’ve been using the board myself for months now, and it’s changed how I think about writing. Instead of “I should write something,” it becomes “what’s in the pipeline, and what stage needs attention?”

The editor also has syntax highlighting that paints your prose by parts of speech - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, passive voice - so the weak spots surface without feeling like a grammar lecture.

Importantly, the editor has zero AI features. I’m not against AI - but I think a writer’s studio needs to be a space for a writer to write.

Share away

Writing in public is a weird kind of loneliness. You publish, you hope someone reads it, and then the post drifts downstream into the internet.

So I added public profiles. Claim a username and your graph goes live at: kerouac.app/u/yourname

You get a clean profile with your recent posts across every platform, share cards, Open Graph images, and an embeddable SVG badge you can drop in your README, your newsletter footer, or the bottom of your blog.

You can follow other writers, peek at their heatmaps, and scroll a chronological feed of what they actually published. It’s proof of work, in public, without becoming another engagement-mining social network.

Simple pricing

I didn’t want feature tiers that make you do math.

Kerouac is free for 30 days, no credit card required. After that, it’s $8/month or $60/year (which saves two months). Every plan gets the full studio. No paywalled features, no surprise charges, no “upgrade to unlock the board” nonsense.

Just pick how you want to pay.

If you want to get started today, you can use this code for 50% off your first year:

FIRSTYEAR50

FIRSTYEAR50

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Why this matters to me

I built Kerouac because I needed it. I’ve been writing online for years, and I was tired of feeling like my work was slipping through my fingers. I wanted a place where every post I’ve ever shipped lives next to every idea I haven’t written yet. I wanted to see the consistency, or the lack of it.

In one sentence: Kerouac is GitHub contribution graphs for writers - plus a drafting studio, a tiny social network of heatmaps, a Linktree replacement, and more coming.

If that sounds like something you need, come take it for a spin.

Grab your username. Connect your platforms. Take the 30-day free trial.

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