Show HN: Jottit – Publish in seconds, reviving my 2007 project with Aaron Swartz

4•simonbc•1h ago

Aaron Swartz and I built Jottit in 2007 as a really simple way for anyone to make a page on the web in seconds. You just typed something, clicked a button, and you got a page on a secret URL. It went offline years ago.

I've now rebuilt it from scratch. It's basically the same idea, but even simpler. Go to jottit.org, write markdown, and you have a published page. Claim it, pick an address, and you now have a feed of your pages at yourname.jottit.org. There's no signup to start writing. And no JS on public pages. You can export your writing when you want.

Jottit is free and open source. It's not a startup, just something I really wanted to exist again.

Comments

simonbc•1h ago

Building Jottit with Aaron was one of the most satisfying creative experiences of my life. The original was wiki-style, more of a small site builder. This rebuild keeps the same spirit but leans into simple publishing.

Stack is Flask, vanilla JS (admin UI only), PostgreSQL, deployed on Fly.io. Source: https://github.com/jottit/jottit

Happy to answer any questions.

the_alphalaser•1h ago

Love the simplicity! How did you know Aaron btw?

simonbc•1h ago

Thanks! We were both finalists for the ArsDigita Prize, a programming contest for high schoolers that ran from 1999-2001 (different years though), so that's how I initially heard about Aaron. When Paul Graham announced the Summer Founders Program in 2005 (as YC was called back then), Aaron posted on his blog that he was looking for a co-founder. I emailed him and we ended up getting accepted and spending the summer in an MIT dorm room building Infogami. Jottit came a couple years later.

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