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Simon Carstensen

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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.

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Simon Carstensen

Looking for my next project

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 reg...

Simon Carstensen

Can you be indie with an LLM?

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 abo...

Simon Carstensen

The hard part isn't building anymore

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...

Simon Carstensen

Rebuilding Jottit

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 i...

Simon Carstensen

Tinypost now has comments

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 verifica...

Simon Carstensen

Why I split Jottit into two apps

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...

Simon Carstensen

How blogrolls work in Jottit

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 ...

Simon Carstensen

How Do You Fund the Open Web?

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 receiv...

Simon Carstensen

Starting IndieAuth

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 do...

Simon Carstensen

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 publ...

Simon Carstensen

An email from Aaron

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, there's a text box, you type stuff in, hit save, and you get a page at a random URL.

The radical simplicity instantly got me excited.

"The cognitive load is so tiny that you just go ahead and use it without even thinking about whether you should or not," Aaron wrote.

We built it and called it Jottit.