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  • The Reader
    The Reader

Why I haven’t written for some time

Or, why can’t I just set up a WordPress or Substack like a normal person?

I’ve had this utopian ideal that’s been eating away at me for years now: I want to be able to write, preview, and publish pieces to my website, without having to worry about securing (or paying for) a WordPress installation, and without giving up control of my audience to somebody who will inevitably harm them by trying to take their time, their money, or both.

Yet, I don’t want to build a full-on social network, where writing the software is only 10% of the work. And I don’t want to be stuck writing in a monospace text editor that I can’t run on an iPad.

All I want is to be able to edit my website from a cafe, without needing to worry about vendor lock-in or maintaining servers.

And now I can! Because this post was published from a cafe, using Obsidian for iPad, to a static website built by Letterhouse: the over engineered, undocumented, yet open source platform that now runs this website.