True Ownership

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 Jottit last year, I knew early on what I wanted to do differently this time: true data ownership.

The old Jottit allowed you to export your pages, so users were never stuck on the platform. But I wanted to take this much further and go for true ownership this time.

Export is of course a huge part of ownership, it means you're always free to move on. But true ownership is also being able to change anything about your site - pages, templates, styling.

So instead of storing pages in a database, I decided to store everything as files. This lets users export the full site source and easily put it on another platform (because we build on standards like Markdown, HTML, CSS).

Just as importantly, it lets users change anything about their sites. Not just pages, but everything that goes into building their site.

The radical simplicity of frictionless publishing coupled with this deep level of data ownership makes Jottit quite magical to use. You get the ease of a hosted platform with the freedom of running your own site.