Your readers came to read your thoughts. Not to be tracked. Not to be profiled. Not to have their behavior sold to the highest bidder.

Yet that's exactly what happens on most blogging platforms.

The Tracking Trap

Let me paint a picture of what happens when you publish on a typical blogging platform:

Medium: Loads 47 third-party tracking scripts. They know what your readers read, how long they spent on each sentence, whether they scrolled to the end, what device they used, where they came from. This data feeds their algorithm, which decides who sees your work next. Oh, and they serve ads based on this data.

WordPress with popular plugins: Your site becomes a data collection machine. Google Analytics. Facebook Pixel. Intercom chat widget. Mailchimp signup forms. Each one drops tracking cookies, sends behavioral data to external servers, and slows down your site by a few hundred milliseconds.

Substack: They track "engagement" to power their recommendation algorithm. They know who reads what, how often, and what keeps people engaged longest. Your readers' privacy is a feature they use to make their product stickier.

And here's the thing—you probably didn't even realize you were doing this to your readers.

The Privacy Problem Your Readers Face

GDPR fines are a real thing. A baker in Austria got fined €100 for having Google Analytics without explicit consent. Suddenly, your innocent blog can become a compliance nightmare.

More importantly, many of your readers are privacy-conscious. They use ad blockers. They disable JavaScript. They don't want to be tracked across the internet, and they definitely don't expect to be tracked when they visit your personal blog.

When you use a platform full of tracking scripts, you're asking your readers to compromise their privacy just to read your thoughts.

That's not okay.

The Umami Difference

At Jottings, I built privacy into the architecture. No ads. No third-party trackers. No data brokers. Just you, your readers, and the words you write.

But we didn't sacrifice analytics. We just chose a better tool.

Umami is different. It's a privacy-respecting analytics platform that gives you real metrics without the tracking burden:

• No cookies: Umami uses fingerprinting instead of cookies. No cookie consent banner needed.
• GDPR compliant: Fully compliant without legal handwringing. Your readers' privacy is actually protected.
• Minimal data: We collect pageviews and basic referral data. Nothing more. Nothing you could use to creepily identify or profile your readers.
• Self-hosted: Umami runs on Jottings' own servers. Your data doesn't get sent to Google or Facebook.

Free Jottings users get basic Umami analytics—pageview counts, top posts, traffic sources. If you upgrade to Pro, you get access to the full Umami dashboard with more detailed metrics.

The key difference: we only track what matters for running a blog. Not for building psychological profiles or manipulating behavior.

Why Privacy Actually Matters

There are three reasons to care about this:

1. Respect for your readers. They came to read your thoughts, not to fuel someone else's data machine. Privacy is respect.

2. Trust. There's something implicit in a personal blog—a covenant between writer and reader. When you use a privacy-first platform, you signal that you value that relationship more than you value surveillance metrics.

3. Compliance. GDPR, CCPA, DMA, ePrivacy Directive—privacy regulations are getting stricter. A platform built with privacy as a feature keeps you compliant by default. No lawyers needed.

You Actually Own Your Blog

Here's something that separates Jottings from every other blogging platform: you can export your data anytime. Every post, every tag, every bit of metadata. In a standard format. Not a locked-in silo.

If you ever want to move to another platform—or host your blog yourself—your data comes with you. No extraction fees. No format conversion nightmares.

Your blog is yours. Not rented.

And because Jottings generates static HTML sites, your blog is hosted on Cloudflare's global CDN. No server-side tracking is even possible. Your readers connect to a static file. That's it.

The Business Model Question

You might be wondering: if Jottings doesn't have ads or sell data, how do we make money?

Subscriptions. Pro users pay a small monthly fee for custom domains, advanced analytics, and priority support. That's it. Your money goes directly to building a better product, not to maximizing ad revenue or selling data to advertisers.

No misaligned incentives. No temptation to monetize your readers.

Privacy as a Feature

Here's the thing most platforms get wrong: they treat privacy as a compliance checkbox. Something you add reluctantly to pass regulations.

I built Jottings with privacy as a feature. It's not something I do because the law says I have to. It's something I do because it's the right thing to do.

Your readers deserve a place to read without being tracked. You deserve to run a blog without worrying about GDPR fines or your readers' data getting hacked. The internet deserves fewer data brokers and more honest platforms.

Give It a Try

If you're tired of platforms that treat your readers like products to be measured and monetized, Jottings is here.

Create a free site today. No credit card. No dark patterns. No surprise tracking scripts.

Write for the joy of writing. Let your readers read in peace.

That's the internet we should have built in the first place.