December is here, and honestly, I'm both relieved and excited. We shipped some features I've been wanting to build for months, fixed some gnarly performance issues, and got some wonderful feedback from the community. Let me walk you through what happened this month.

The Big One: Analytics Dashboard

The number one request we've gotten over the past few months has been: "Show me how many people are reading my stuff."

So we built it.

The new Analytics Dashboard gives you real data about your site visitors. You can see:

• Daily pageviews across your entire site (with a graph you can actually read)
• Top posts ranked by visits (so you know what resonates)
• Traffic sources (direct, referral, search)
• Visitor geography (because sometimes you're curious where your readers are from)
• Time-on-page metrics (do people actually stay to read or do they bounce?)

What I love about this is that it's optional. If you don't care about analytics—and honestly, lots of people don't—it just sits there quietly. But if you're curious about your audience (and most of us are, let's be honest), it's there.

We're not tracking anything creepy. No fingerprinting. No third-party pixels. Just clean, simple data. The analytics come from Cloudflare's own access logs, so we're not adding new tracking code. Privacy-first, like everything we do.

Bulk Tagging: The Productivity Win

This one came from frustration. I had created a site with 200+ jots, and tagging them one-by-one was mind-numbing.

So now you can:

• Select multiple jots from your dashboard
• Bulk-add or bulk-remove tags
• Delete multiple jots at once (with a confirmation dialog, because accidents)

It sounds simple, but it's one of those features that saves you 20 minutes when you're doing content migration or reorganizing your archive. Sometimes the most valuable features are just saving people tedious work.

Performance: We Went Fast

This month we identified and fixed something that was bothering me for weeks. Sites with lots of jots (200+) were taking 4-5 seconds to load their home page. That's not acceptable.

Turns out the issue was in our tag rendering. Every time you loaded a page, we were making a separate database query for each tag's jot count. If your site had 50 tags, that's 50 extra queries. Simple fix in theory, but it required rebuilding how tags are aggregated.

Now the same site loads in under 800ms. It's night and day.

We also optimized image serving. If you're uploading photos to your jots, they were being served at full resolution (which can be large). Now we automatically serve optimized images that are resized for different screen sizes. Smaller file sizes, faster loads, same visual quality.

Bug Fixes (The Quiet Heroes)

• Fixed an issue where custom domains weren't showing the correct site banner
• Corrected pagination links on tag pages (they were pointing to wrong page numbers)
• Fixed a bug where deleted media was still showing in your upload history
• Resolved an edge case where newly created sites weren't appearing in analytics for 5 minutes

These don't sound exciting, but they were blocking real workflows for real people.

What the Community Built

One thing I love about building in public is seeing what people do with the tools you give them.

A few highlights:

• @jessie created a "morning pages" site that auto-publishes daily prompts. She's using the API to automate jot creation from Zapier. Pretty clever.
• The Vellum Writers community created a collaborative site template where multiple authors post short fiction. They're using tags to organize by genre and author.
• Devon built a visual archive of his travel photos with custom domain setup (devon-travels.com). The analytics dashboard is helping him understand which countries' photos get the most interest.

This stuff makes building Jottings feel worth it. You're not just using software—you're creating something that matters to you.

What Didn't Make the Cut

Not everything I wanted to build this month made it. Specifically:

• Email subscriptions: I wanted to let readers subscribe to be notified of new jots via email. The feature is 80% done, but I realized the current design doesn't quite work for every site type. Pushing to January.
• AI-powered summaries: You know how some platforms auto-generate summaries? I started building that, but honestly, it felt gimmicky. Might not ship this one at all.

Sometimes saying "no" is more important than shipping incomplete features.

The Metrics

Since you probably want to know how the actual business is doing:

• Users: 2,847 (up from 2,450 last month)
• Pro subscribers: 312 (converted from 287, so 25 new subscriptions)
• Sites created: 3,291 total (1,089 this month alone)
• Jots written: 184,000+ total
• Churn rate: 8% monthly (which is actually good for a product like this)

The growth is modest but consistent. Most people finding Jottings are indie bloggers and writers who value simplicity. That's exactly who I want using this.

Looking Ahead to 2026

I'm already thinking about next year, and here's what's on my mind:

• Email subscriptions (finally)
• Better mobile editing (the mobile UI needs work)
• Scheduled publishing (publish jots at a specific time)
• Collaboration features (multiple authors, edit permissions)
• Performance tier for power users (unlimited media, larger sites)

The big question is: should I charge for advanced features, or keep the core always free? I'm leaning toward keeping Jottings accessible to everyone, with optional Pro features. But that's a December-thinking problem for another day.

A Quick Thank You

I want to thank everyone who reported bugs, requested features, or just sent kind words this month. The Discord community is becoming a real thing. People are helping each other. Sharing tips. Using Jottings in ways I never imagined.

That's what makes this worth doing.

Also, thanks to the folks who switched from other platforms. Several people mentioned they left Medium, Substack, or other services because Jottings felt more like theirs. That's the highest compliment I can get.

Until Next Month

December is busy for everyone, so this update might be shorter than usual. January's update will probably be longer—I have a backlog of things to talk about.

If you haven't tried Jottings yet, now's a good time. Free plan gets you everything you need. Try it, see what you think, and if you hate it, that's fine too. Not every tool is for everyone.

If you're already using it, thank you. Seriously.

Next month: email subscriptions, deeper analytics, and hopefully some good stories from the community.

Until then, keep writing.

— Vishal