The feeling is liberation. Pure, unfiltered freedom. After years of posting daily on Medium, watching four stories get boosted in November and earning real money, then watching December slip past the halfway point with no boosts at all, I'm done waiting for algorithmic validation. I'm done writing for someone else's distribution system.

What Static Blogs Can Offer That Platforms Cannot

I want to start something independent. My own domain, Eleventy as my static site generator, Buttondown for newsletters. I already have the IndieWeb facilities in place, microformats, Webmentions, the whole ecosystem of human-owned web infrastructure.

But I don't just want to have an independent publication. I want it to be good. I want the branding to immediately signal "this is independent literary journalism with credibility and meaning." I want readers to understand they're getting something they can't get anywhere else.

So I'm asking myself what exactly can an independent publication like mine offer? What am I missing? What haven't I thought of? Let me research this properly and figure it out.

I'm very anti-big corporations. I'm trying my best to only use small, independent solutions for analytics, hosting, and everything else. No Google. No Meta. No surveillance capitalism masquerading as "free" services.

The good news? There are excellent alternatives to Google Analytics that actually respect your readers' privacy.

Plausible Analytics is my top choice. It's made and hosted in the EU by a bootstrapped, debt-free team of 10 who refuse venture capital. Their script is 75 times smaller than Google Analytics, meaning faster load times and lower carbon footprint. No cookies. No personal data collection. No cross-site tracking. Pricing starts at $9/month for up to 10k monthly pageviews. They're also fully open-source, so you can audit the code yourself.

Other options include:

• Fathom Analytics ($15/month): Similar privacy-first approach, slightly cheaper than Plausible for high traffic
• Simple Analytics (€9/month): Encrypted at rest, no IP addresses stored
• Umami ($9/month or self-hosted): Open-source, can be self-hosted for free
• Pirsch: Made and hosted in Germany, beautiful theming options

All of these are 100% GDPR and CCPA compliant out of the box. No cookie banners needed. Your readers' privacy is protected by default.

Ethical Ad Networks

Now, about monetization. I definitely don't want to use Google AdSense. Luckily, there are independent alternatives.

EthicalAds is specifically designed for developer-focused sites and respects privacy. They never set cookies, don't use user-specific data for targeting, and their code is open source. Ads are hand-curated, so you know exactly what's appearing on your site.

Other options worth considering:

• Carbon Ads: Serves the design and development community, simple single-placement ads
• BuySellAds: Marketplace model where you control pricing and which ads run
• Sovrn: Brands itself as "the ad network for the independent web"

Important caveat: Many independent ad networks require significant traffic before approval (often 50k+ monthly pageviews). If you're just starting out, consider:

• Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee for reader support
• Buttondown paid newsletters ($9/month for the service, you keep 100% of subscriber revenue)
• Direct sponsorships from companies aligned with your values

Treat ads as a supplement to your income, not the foundation. Your independence is the product. Readers who value that will support you directly.

POSSE: Own Your Content

As I wrote about in my previous post,POSSE stands for "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere." It's an IndieWeb principle coined by Tantek Çelik in 2012.

The workflow is simple:

1. Write once on your own site (the source of truth)
2. Syndicate automatically to Medium, Substack, social media
3. Link back to the original on your domain
4. Collect responses via Webmentions

Tools for POSSE Implementation

• Bridgy: Open-source service that sends webmentions for comments, likes, and interactions from Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit back to your site
• Echofeed: Reads your RSS feed and cross-posts to Mastodon, Bluesky, Micro.blog automatically
• IFTTT or Zapier: I haven't really looked into whether these can automate an independent site, but theoretically you could automate posting to multiple platforms from RSS

The beauty of POSSE is that you're meeting readers where they are while still maintaining a canonical source you control. When a site shifts algorithm or implodes, your content survives. When readers engage on those platforms, their interactions flow back to your site via Webmentions.

Manu Moreale notes the trade-off is monitoring multiple platforms for responses. But tools like Bridgy automate most of this. The key is your site is the hub, everything else is spokes.

What Readers Want From Literary Blogs

What do readers want from an independent literary blog specifically? Research from Jane Friedman, Anne R. Allen, and the IndieWeb community suggests several core principles:

1. Authenticity Over Optimization

As Anne R. Allen writes,

"The only thing that stays the same is the value of good content."

When blogging rules said posts should be 300 words and published twice daily, nobody successful actually did that. The rules are bullshit. Write what matters to you, in your voice, at the length it needs to be.

From the literary blog archives, successful independent publications like Steven Mitchelmore's This Space of Writing succeeded precisely because they rejected "liveliness" in favour of intensity of purpose. Literary journalism that treats reading as "not simply a life-enhancing but a life-determining activity."

2. Show, Don't Tell (Even in Non-Fiction)

Journalists' blogging guidelines emphasize:

• Short paragraphs: A 300-word paragraph looks long online. Break it up.
• Write tightly: Omit unnecessary words. You can't bury the lede.
• Use hyperlinks: Let readers explore deeper without cluttering your main narrative

Purdue's guide to literary journalism reminds us,

"Literary journalism requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject."

You're writing reflective personal essays, yes, but you're also performing literary citizenship through immersion journalism. Research. Report. Make it literary.

3. Consistency Without Burnout

Jane Friedman warns about burnout in writing advice blogs.

"Initially, you'll have no shortage of ideas... In my experience, burn out."

The solution? **Write what energizes you, not what you think you should write.**Set a manageable schedule. Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? The writer blog guides all emphasize that consistency matters more than frequency. Quality over quantity.

4. Literary Citizenship

This concept from Jane Friedman is crucial for independent literary publications. Literary citizenship means:

• Celebrating other writers' work (book reviews, interviews)
• Discussing craft (what you're learning)
• Engaging with the literary community (responding to others' essays)
• Documenting your reading life ("What I'm Reading Now" posts)

Ann Morgan's blog, A Year of Reading the World, became life-changing precisely because it practiced literary citizenship at scale. She read a book from every country, documented the journey, and the community responded. TED talks. Book deals. A transformed life.

What Independent Publications Uniquely Offer

What can a static blog offer that Medium or Substack or whatever else cannot?

Permanent URLs You Control

Medium can change policies, pivot business models, or shut down tomorrow. Your content would disappear. With your own domain, your writing lasts as long as you pay $12/year for hosting. That's it.

URLs are forever. Every essay has a permanent address. Readers can bookmark it. Reference it. Link to it. Ten years from now, it'll still be there.

Design That Reflects Your Voice

Medium's design is... Medium's design. And Substack's is Substack's. Everyone looks the same.

With a static site, you control everything. Typography. Color. Layout. Whether you want a minimalist single-column or a newspaper-style grid. Whether you include pull quotes or marginalia or experimental layouts. Your design is your brand.

The Book Design Blog celebrates beautiful publications. Independent sites can be artifacts. Craft matters.

No Algorithmic Interference

Medium decides what gets boosted. Substack decides what gets featured. Algorithms optimize for engagement, not quality.

Your site? You decide what's prominent. Your best work is always accessible. Your archive is navigable. No algorithm hides your older essays because they're "not performing."

Community On Your Terms

Substack comments are... fine. Medium comments are mostly spam. Don't even look at Twitter.

With Webmentions, conversations happen wherever readers are comfortable, Mastodon, their own blogs, anywhere. They low back to your site automatically. Ana Ulin explains

"I don't provide a way to comment on my site, but I do share some posts on social media and in other places that are more conducive to conversation."

You can link to those conversations. Readers can find them. But you're not locked into one platform's comment system.

Data Ownership and Portability

Every article you write is a plain text Markdown file in a Git repository. No proprietary formats. No vendor lock-in. If you want to move hosts, you move the files. Done.

Exporting your Substack or Medium archive into a usable format for your own independent blog is actually a little tricky. I had to write a Javascript converter to do the conversion.

Static sites are inherently portable. Your writing is yours, in a format that will outlast any platform.

Learning in Public, Writing in Public

It's often said that the best way to learn something is by trying to teach it to someone else. To write in public holds you to a higher standard, encouraging depth over brevity and rigour over speed.

Andy Matuschak pioneered public note-taking. Tom Critchlow built a "digital garden" of evolving notes. Maggie Appleton theorizes the practice.

Digital gardens are different from blogs:

Blog	Digital Garden
Chronological	Topical
Polished	Evolving
Performance	Process
Finished	Growing

You can have both. A /blog for finished essays. A /notes or /garden for works-in-progress. Let readers see your thinking develop.

Obsidian Publish, Quartz, or custom Eleventy setups can turn your note-taking system into a public knowledge base. Your research becomes reference material for yourself and others.

The Spiritual Practice

I want to centre the act of writing itself in what I'm doing, I also want it to be a deeply personal and even spiritual practice for myself as well where I can just free bleed on the page without any pressure or expectation.

Maria Popova turned her reading notes into The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), one of the most respected literary publications online. She writes for herself first. The audience comes because the work is genuine.

Your blog can be both public and private. Polished essays for readers and raw notes for yourself. Morning pages that never get published and refined pieces that do. The practice of showing up daily to write is what matters.

As Dinty Moore writes about Virginia Woolf's essays

she starts small, not with the lede. An intimate detail. A moth. The mundane made luminous through attention.

Literary journalism is witnessing. You're an eyewitness to the world. Document what you see. Make it matter.

Technical Considerations

If you're looking for specific, in-the-weeds guidance on implementation:

• Use Netlify or Vercel for hosting (both offer generous free tiers + build automation)
• Porkbun for domain registration (independent, great support)
• Buttondown for newsletters ($9/month, Markdown support, portable subscriber list)
• Keep your Git repo on GitLab (not GitHub/Microsoft)

For RSS to social media automation, Echofeed is currently the best option. Bridgy handles backfeed from social media to your site.

What Else You Can Add

One of my favourite aspects of having an indepedent blog is that you can have a page for anything. There are no constraints on what you can explore or document.

1. A /now Page

Pioneered by Derek Sivers, a /now page answers "What are you focused on right now?" Updated monthly. Lets readers know what you're working on, what you're reading, what's consuming your attention.

2. A /uses Page

From the uses.tech movement: document your tools, setup, workflow. What software do you use to write? What hardware? Readers love this stuff. It builds connection.

3. A /support or /thanks Page

Be explicit about how readers can support your work. Ko-fi? Patreon? Just knowing it's an option matters. Maggie Appleton's support page is a great model.

4. Comprehensive /about and /contact Pages

Make it easy to find you. Email. Social media. Your story. What you're trying to do with this publication. brennan.day should make your mission crystal clear.

5. Post Series and Collections

Tag related posts. Create landing pages for series. Make your archive navigable by theme, not just chronology.

6. A Reading List or Blogroll

Who else are you reading? Link to them. Practice literary citizenship. The 32-Bit Café maintains a beautiful blogroll. Do the same.

7. Minimal, Intentional Design

The Markup does investigative data journalism with a clean, accessible design. The Pudding does visual essays that are works of art. Gwern writes timeless essays with marginal notes and collapsible sections.

Find your aesthetic. Make it functional first, beautiful second. Accessibility matters the most. After that, typography matters. Readability matters. Fast load times matter.

What can your site be?

• Privacy-respecting (Plausible analytics, no tracking)
• Accessible (semantic HTML, proper alt text, keyboard navigation)
• Fast (static generation, minimal JavaScript, optimized images)
• Sustainable (low-carbon footprint, open-source tools)
• Beautiful (thoughtful design that reflects your voice)
• Permanent (your domain, your content, your control)

And your writing can be:

• Independent (no algorithms, no editorial oversight)
• Literary (craft matters, style matters)
• Journalistic (researched, reported, credible)
• Personal (your voice, your perspective, your truth)
• Spiritual (a practice of attention and witness)

Have control over your content. Have permanence. Value priavcy for yourself an readers. Build a community on your own terms across the decentralized web. What what matters, because that will last.

The independent web is still here. It never left. We just forgot it was an option.

So start. Write daily. Publish what's ready. Learn in public. Document the journey. Make it beautiful. Make it yours.

The readers will come. The ones who matter will stay. And ten years from now, when Medium is a footnote in internet history, your work will still be there. Exactly where you put it and exactly as you made it.

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Resources Mentioned:

• Analytics: Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami
• Ad Networks: EthicalAds, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds
• POSSE Tools: Bridgy, Echofeed, IndieWeb Wiki
• Newsletters: Buttondown
• Hosting: Netlify, Vercel
• Inspiration: The Marginalian, The Pudding, Gwern, A Year of Reading the World