I used to host this site on a managed blogging platform. It was easy — write in a browser, hit publish, done. But convenience has a cost, and I decided I wasn’t willing to pay it anymore.

The tradeoff

Managed platforms are great until they aren’t. Your content lives on someone else’s infrastructure, governed by someone else’s terms. They can change pricing, shut down, or alter how your content is served at any time.

More importantly, most managed platforms inject their own scripts, analytics, and tracking into your pages. Even if you don’t track your readers, the platform might.

What I wanted instead

The requirements were simple:

  1. Full ownership — my content lives in a Git repo I control
  2. Zero tracking — no analytics, no third-party scripts, no fonts loaded from Google
  3. Lightweight output — every page under 20KB, loads instantly on any connection
  4. Easy publishing — I still want to write in a browser, not a terminal

Static site generators solve most of this. Hugo builds the site, a browser-based CMS lets me write without touching code, and Cloudflare Pages serves it for free at the edge.

The result

Every page on this site is plain HTML and CSS. No JavaScript runs on any public-facing page. There are no cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels. Your browser makes one request and gets back everything it needs.

Is it more work than a managed platform? Slightly. But the tradeoff is worth it — I own every byte, and you can read without being watched.