A blog you host yourself, made for one writer and their readers.

You write, it publishes, and all of it sits on a server you control.

Someone on a weak signal with an old handset still sees the words almost at once.

Opening a post costs about 121 KB, and a photo from your phone is a few times heavier. That is a default install with nothing switched off, measured off the network on a first visit: book mode and the reader’s pen are on out of the box and are priced here as what they are. Switch those two off and the same post is 112 KB. The blog’s own pictures are counted separately, because they are your content rather than the software. It stays this way because every bundle has a size limit the build enforces: a feature cannot quietly start costing every reader a little more forever.

Reading comfort is the point of the whole project.

Four looks for the published page. Six palettes, each drawn separately for light and dark. Four reading fonts cut per script, or bring your own font file. Footnotes, callouts, mathematics as real MathML, and a pen that highlights, underlines and rings the lines worth keeping, every stroke drawn a little differently the way a hand draws. And search that folds diacritics, so lap trinh finds Lập trình.

the year in view, lit

set like a printed spread

it opens on a title page

Four looks, and the last question setup asks is which one. A look decides shape, type and marks; it carries no colour of its own, so all four come out in the palette you chose and in whatever your reader picks over it.

six inks, light and dark, readers can switch

Your readers get a pen of their own.

Select a sentence on any post and a small bar offers five inks, a pencil underline, a ballpoint ring, a note and the quote. The mark is drawn with the site's own hand and anchored to the words, not to a position, so it survives the author fixing a typo three paragraphs up. It lives in the reader's browser and is sent nowhere. Keep on every device carries it across by a twenty-character code, or by the Google sign-in commenters already have; the server keeps a hash, never an address, and the owner sees none of it. Send to my notebook hands the passage to the reader's own Quire Ink, or to any site that speaks Micropub. On from the first install, and one switch turns it off.

five inks, a pencil, a ring, a note

People can follow you where they already read.

Switch on the fediverse and the blog becomes an account: somebody on Mastodon presses Follow, and every post you publish arrives in the timeline they already have open. That is a different thing from a feed, which asks a reader to keep a second application for you alone. Both work, and both are yours to switch off.

One more door, shut until you open it: a read-only API hands your writing to a program as JSON with the Markdown intact, which is how you would build a second front end, a search index or a link checker without anything scraping your pages one at a time.

The fediverse account and the API both arrive off, on a new blog and on an upgrade. A door that opens itself because the software updated overnight is not a door you chose.

An AI can write and publish for you.

Quire Ink ships a working MCP server. Connect Claude, or another assistant, and say:

"Write a 600-word post about today's trip, tag it travel, publish it."

you, to your assistant, from anywhere

It drafts and publishes through exactly the rules you use: the same slug checks, the same revisions, the same soft delete. Its access is a token you created in the admin, and you can take it away at any moment. Every post is also served as raw Markdown to any agent that asks, because that is the source it was written in.

the same blog, in your hand

There is no database to install and nothing to deploy.

Point a domain at one command and you have a blog:

bun src/index.tsthis is the whole deploy

One Bun process, two SQLite files, a directory of uploads. A backup is a copy. No database server, no cache tier, nothing else to keep alive at three in the morning.

And the part you have to trust is 7.6 MB.

The image is 366 MB on disk and almost none of it was written here. Debian and the Bun runtime take most of it, the Bun binary alone being 76 MB. Libraries take another 63, and they earn it: resizing your photographs, colouring the code in your posts, drawing the picture that shows up when somebody shares one of your posts.

What is left is Quire Ink: 546 files. It was 905 until 2.2.13 went looking and found the test suite riding along inside the image. Every number here was measured inside the 2.2.14 image, not estimated.

The demo above, 39 posts and 18 pictures, already outweighs the program that serves it. That is the right way round. The whole design is written up honestly, including the bugs that shipped and the measurements behind each decision.

How it works inside →

Or try the reading page on the WordPress you have.

Everything above is the engine. The reading page by itself is also a WordPress theme, generated from the same stylesheet: the six palettes, the contents rail, book mode, six self-hosted typefaces, and no third-party request on the page. Install it on the site you already run and the words you already have are set the way this one sets them, this afternoon, with no migration in front of you.

The questions everyone asks first.