I build simple tools for the web. Currently making Jottit (jottit.org) and Tinypost (tinypost.blog), small publishing tools that pick up where the original Jottit left off (built with Aaron Swartz in 2007). Based in Denmark.
Last year I quit my job to rebuild something from my past. Jottit was a tool Aaron Swartz and I made in 2007, back when the web was small and personal and a little weird. You typed something, clicked a button, and had a page online. It disappeared years ago, and I always regretted that. Aaron and I had met Paul Graham as part of Y Combinator's first batch in 2005, so I emailed him about bringing…
I posted the other day about basepage, the local-first tool I'm building that lets you point an agent at a folder of files and have it build and publish a site. Someone replied with a flat objection: AI is the opposite of the indieweb. His case was clean. The indieweb is about ownership, POSSE, choice, and openness. AI, he said, is the exact opposite: dependency, deskilling, no choice, and…
For most of my career, the constraint was building. You had an idea, and then you spent weeks or months making it real. The gap between the idea and the working thing was where almost all the effort went. That gap has mostly closed. With AI, I can build a prototype of almost any idea in a day or two. That sounds like pure upside, and it mostly is, but it quietly moves the hard part somewhere else.…
In 2007, Aaron Swartz and I built a small tool called Jottit. The idea was simple: make it as easy as possible to put a page on the web. You typed something, clicked a button, and got a page on a secret URL. You didn't need to create an account first. If you wanted to keep it, you claimed it with your email and put it on a subdomain. Aaron had this phrase that stuck with me. He wanted the…
I just shipped comments for Tinypost. Here's how they work. If you're the blog owner and you're logged in, you just type and post. Your name shows up with an "author" badge next to it. If you're a reader, you enter your name, email, and comment. Tinypost sends you a verification code. Enter it and your comment goes live. No account needed. That's the whole system. No CAPTCHA, no OAuth, no "sign in…
I've been quiet for a bit (moving house, painting walls) but I also made a big decision about Jottit. When Aaron Swartz and I built Jottit in 2007, it was a very specific thing: the simplest way to make a web page. You'd type something, hit save, and you had a page. That was it. When I started rebuilding it last year, I kept adding things. Blogging features, RSS feeds, dark mode, image uploads.…
Blogrolls used to be everywhere. In the early web, your sidebar had a list of blogs you read. A simple way to say "these people are worth your time." Then social media came along and sociality moved to the feed. Your reading habits became algorithmic and the humble blogroll disappeared. I wanted to bring them back, but not as a static list of links. Inspired by Dave Winer Dave Winer's blogroll on…
When I started building the original Jottit back in 2007, I was a CS student with no kids and no mortgage to worry about. Almost 20 years later, with four children and a family to support, the question of funding looks a little different. I was incredibly fortunate to receive initial funding from Paul Graham (I was part of the first YC batch in 2005 with Aaron Swartz, so we know each other from…
Today I'm beginning work on IndieAuth endpoints for Jottit. The goal is to let people publish to their Jottit sites from any Micropub client, whether that's web apps, mobile apps, or desktop tools. IndieAuth is OAuth 2.0 for the open web. Users authenticate with their own domain, and apps discover auth endpoints from the site's HTML. For Jottit, this means adding an authorization endpoint (consent…
The core idea of the original Jottit that we built in 2007 was frictionless publishing. You could build your own site just by clicking a button. You didn't have to create an account and the UI was so simple you didn't have to think much about how it worked. Frictionless publishing is still at the heart of Jottit today, although the idea of course is much less novel now. When I decided to revive…
Here's how Jottit originally got started. In April 2007, Aaron Swartz sent me an email asking what I was up to. I told him I wasn't really up to any exciting projects and suggested that perhaps we build something together. Aaron was already busy on other projects, but was willing to offer his remaining bandwidth advising me. He also had an idea. He called it createapage.com: you go to the site,…