Less Duct Tape, More Website

I think more people should own their own little corner of the internet.

I don’t mean everyone needs to suddenly become a blogger, but it’s nice to have somewhere you can write things down. Post photos. Link to projects.

Not a feed you’re renting from someone else. A small place on the web that is truly yours.

Building and maintaining that kind of website can be a bit messy. Believe me, I know. My site was built with 11ty and a few other bits of glue. It worked well enough, but it always felt like a lot of different pieces held together with little more than duct tape and prayers.

So I built Inkstead, and I’ve migrated my own site to it.

Inkstead is a small publishing engine for personal websites. You write posts in Markdown, it builds a static site, and it can also post to places like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Flickr.

To be clear, it is still very much a tool for developers, or at least for people who are technically inclined. It is not trying to be WordPress or Squarespace.

The scope is much smaller: make this particular kind of website easier to set up, understand, and maintain for developers.

It is intentionally opinionated. It is not trying to replace every other static site generator. It is not trying to support every kind of website. It is built around the kind of personal site I want to have.

I tried really hard to make syndication feel natural. If I write a longer post, social platforms should get a title and a link back to my site. But if I write a short note or post a photo, it should feel like something I could have posted directly there.

Inkstead is also built around adapters. My site currently uses GitHub Actions and Cloudflare Workers, but you can pick other options.

This is all still early, and it is absolutely possible I have overengineered my personal website (once again).

But I like the direction.

Inkstead is my attempt at making owning your corner of the internet a little bit easier, as long as you’re comfortable with code. And without having to turn your personal website into a full-time job.