Let me walk you through a typical blogging setup in 2025:

You sign up for WordPress. You're presented with 50,000+ plugins. Some are for SEO. Some are for security. Some are for caching. Some are for email. Some are outdated and will break your site.

You try Squarespace. Beautiful templates, but three hours later you're still configuring colors, fonts, sidebar widths, and hover effects. You haven't written a single post.

You look at Ghost. Powerful, elegant, but you're paying $200+ a year and using 10% of its features. You wanted a blog. You got an entire publishing empire.

This is the blogging paradox of 2025: more features means less actual writing.

The Minimalism Question

Here's what I think minimalism in blogging actually means:

It doesn't mean "fewer features." It means a ruthless focus on the one thing that matters: writing.

Minimalism is saying "no" to:

• Comment sections that devolve into noise
• Follower counts that create anxiety
• 200 theme options that all look the same
• Analytics dashboards showing you that nobody read your post
• Configuration pages with 40 different toggles
• Endless plugin dependency updates

Minimalism is saying "yes" to:

• A blank page that gets out of your way
• One clean design (not 200 to choose from)
• Fast loading times
• Your words, owned by you, on your domain
• Export and portability (no lock-in)
• The ability to publish a thought and move on

The 600px Container Philosophy

Here's a design principle I'm obsessed with: the 600px container.

It's the width of a book page. It's the width of a comfortable reading experience. It's the width that says "this is a place for writing, not a billboard."

Most blogging platforms put your content in a 1200px wide space. Then they fill the sides with sidebars, widgets, ads, recommended posts, email signup forms, and chaos. Your actual writing becomes 40% of the screen.

When you write on a minimalist platform, the entire screen is your writing. There are no distractions. No sidebars. No algorithmic recommendations of other content. Just you and your words.

That's Jottings.

What Minimalist Doesn't Mean (It Still Ships)

I built Jottings to be minimal, but minimal doesn't mean weak.

You can still map your own custom domain to your site. blog.yourname.com instead of yourname.jottings.me. Your site becomes yours in every way.

You get AI-assisted features when they're actually useful—like auto-tagging your posts so readers can discover similar thoughts, or generating SEO descriptions that help people find your writing.

You get static site generation that means your site loads in milliseconds and is impossible to hack. No databases to maintain. No security patches. No WordPress vulnerabilities.

You can export all your data at any time. Your words aren't locked in a proprietary format. They're yours.

That's not minimal in features. That's minimal in friction.

Who This Is For

Minimalist blogging is for:

Writers who want to write. Not configure. Not optimize. Not study the algorithm. Just write and publish.

Developers tired of maintaining WordPress. You know the feeling. A plugin breaks. A theme becomes unsupported. A security update demands your attention at 2 AM. Minimalist platforms don't need maintenance. They just work.

Anyone overwhelmed by feature bloat. You don't need 40 theme options. You don't need to enable/disable 30 features. You don't need a 6-hour setup process. You need a place to write and a click to publish.

People who believe in the personal web. You don't want to optimize for the algorithm. You don't want your words on someone else's platform. You want a corner of the internet that feels like yours.

The Format Matters

I call them "jots" because the format itself encourages minimalism.

A jot is short. Not because it has to be, but because that's the spirit of the format. A jot is a thought, a link, a photo, a quick observation. It doesn't demand perfection. It doesn't require a title and a conclusion and SEO keywords.

Because of this, people write more. They publish more. They stop waiting for the "perfect" blog post idea and just... write.

A blog post might take a week. A jot takes 30 seconds.

And somehow, the jots add up to something bigger than any individual blog post. They become a chronicle of thought. A stream of consciousness. A real person thinking out loud.

That's more valuable than a perfectly optimized blog post that took three months to write.

The Minimalism Manifesto

If you're tired of blogging platforms that feel like they're trying to be everything, here's what I believe:

• Simple is a feature. It's not a limitation.
• Your words matter more than the platform. The design should disappear.
• You should own your data. Not rent your presence from a corporation.
• Speed matters. Blogging platforms shouldn't require a loading bar.
• Configuration is friction. Defaults should just work.
• Less thinking about the platform means more thinking about writing.

Try It

Jottings is free to start. No credit card. No setup wizard. No plugins to choose from.

Sign up. Create a site. Write a jot. Publish.

That's it.

If you like it and you want to support independent software, upgrade to Pro and add your own domain.

The minimalist blogging platform you've been waiting for is here. It's time to write again.