🌐 Where's your website?

7 min read Original article ↗

How to have a proper small web website within minutes; free, lightweight, easy.

Photo of a 'computer' that has a potato as motherboard, with the RAM and all other hardware attached to it.
―Image: Potato PC. Source uncertain,‍[⇣] but undoubtedly a funny person.

“Oh I use Instagram.”

There's so many people I've come across whose thoughts and creations I would consume with pleasure. Yet most of them don't have their own blog/website and instead resort to the infinite scrolling slot machines whose plentiful issues and scandals require a distinct essay; 🔜. Aside from all that, these sites are ugly, slow, soulless, and force readers to sign up. No thanks.

Unrealistically but ideally one buys a domain name, codes their own site, and uses Codeberg and/or statichost to host it so that one ensures full control and safety of their content, e.g., easy migration if need be—this is what I do. However, considering how lazy/complacent/inept corporate social media has made the populace, or how scarce spare time is while working full-time, or the frequency of poorly written documentation,‍[⇣] then not making one's own website is understandable. Below, three solutions. None of them Wix, Medium, nor Substack.

Read on if one wishes to trade in their excuses for a small web website that would run on a potato.‍[⇣] A cozy cobweb that reflects your personality.

Free hosting options

With the small web in mind I found these options, sorted according to a fickle preference:

  1. Mataroa.blog
  2. Pagecord.com
  3. Bearblog.dev
Side by side comparison of Mataroa, Pagecord, and Bear.
―Image: side by side comparison of Mataroa, Pagecord, and Bear.

I'm a bit disappointed because without hesitation I would use all of them had I not become accustomed to having full control of aesthetics and functionality of my own website. However, a simple place to write is fine for most. Below are the links to my quick example homepages with the same content, and some first impressions. They all support Markdown syntax; to the non-geeks, this simply means it's easy to create titles, embed images, create bold fonts, et cetera.

🥇 Mataroa

“Naked blogging platform, for minimalists. Just write.”

+ Mataroa gets my preference because it natively supports comments, and while free, the price for premium is commendably hard to beat.

- Annoying is that posts appear on the homepage by default, with large margins, which cannot be disabled.

🥈 Pagecord

“No lock-in, no AI,* no bloat. Just your words, written your way, on your own corner of the web.”

+ On Pagecord one can natively click embedded images to enlarge them. Another difference is that it's the only one that renders YouTube videos.

± It's the most feature rich option, but also the least straightforward and slowest of the three.† My gripe is that Pagecord's text editor immediately converts Markdown syntax into its graphical representation within the text editor, which I find intolerable, but I'm sure others would prefer.

🥉 Bear

“A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform. No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.”

+ Bear has the most straightforward user experience and its default homepage design pleases me on par and sometimes more than Pagecord's. A surprisingly cool feature is that one can easily use an emoji or image as a favicon, and it natively supports LaTeX—yay math!

An indirect feature disadvantage of Bear is that free accounts are hidden from search engines and its own discovery feed. The former I find weird as it limits the reach of the small web and Bear's own success. The developer's response after my reaching out:

“Free blogs can be unhidden from the discovery feed and search engines, they just need to go through a manual review process (https://docs.bearblog.dev/not-seeing-your-post/). This is because 30% of all new blogs are spam, and it turns out that upgrading is a good filter, as is opting in for a review.”

Verdict

One can't go wrong with any of them. The medals above can be dismissed as ornamental.

– – –

* “[…] The “no AI” means no AI features. […]” The developer uses Claude to speed up the grunt work. I reached out and there's zero malicious ambiguity present. Since LLM use can be a deciding factor and is quite the divisive topic, I thought I'd mention it.

† Not to be interpreted as not straightforward, nor slow.

Embedding images

While uploading images to the above websites is supported, understandably unlimited uploads being a premium feature—software is not free, consider paying—I do suggest using a dedicated image hosting platform to simply embed its pictures instead. Why? It takes a load of their back and chiropractors make for bad dentists.

PixelUnion.eu is what I use, pay for, and strongly recommend. It uses Immich, which supports non-destructive image cropping! Moreover, PixelUnion is free below 15㎇ of storage.

How to embed an image hosted on PixelUnion?
  1. Create a public album, surf to its shared link yourself, left click on an image to open it, and now right click the image to select `Copy Image Link`. The link/URL now copied should look like https://YOUR_USERNAME.pixelunion.eu/api/assets/11bf5d37-8c5f-4652-a521-8912d3048082/thumbnail?slug=YOUR_GALLERY_NAME&size=preview&c=msYJHIQrdmg%2BmXigaYp1kGoHqg%3D%3D&edited=true
  2. Use the following Markdown syntax in the blog text editor: ![image_description](the_URL_copied_above)

“Not worth sharing.”

Nonsense. For the umpteenth time—unless posting food pics, then stay at Instagram—let this exquisite simulation of fireflies change your perspective: https://ncase.me/fireflies.* Your ideas matter. Just make something!

―Music video: ANOTHER IDEA - Marc Rebillet.

– – –

* The ambient sound only works in Chromium-based browsers.

POSSE

As opposed to governments—seriously 🤦—it's reluctantly understandable that some social media has become indispensable to a fair amount of one-person projects to network and find an audience, but that doesn't mean having to hold oneself hostage to the greed-driven whims of big corporations.

Now, with your own website, one can “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”.‍[⇣] Create the original content on your own platform of choice and share that on all other social media. POSSE reduces risk, increases agency, stimulates creativity, and makes happy the increasing amount of people sick of parasitic billionaires and their brain rot platforms.

Latest edit: 3 August 2026.
  1. 2026-08-02: adds (1) Fireflies, ANOTHER IDEA, (2) footnote † to Pagecord.
  2. 2026-08-03: adds (1) omitted options and bus factor, (2) Annie Mueller source.

⚜︎

Omitted options

  • Pika.page omitted because I consider a free account post limit of 50 too harsh; it feels slightly coercive even though I'm sure it's not meant this way.
  • Pico.sh/prose seems awesome, but command line is too complicated for non-technical folk to start off with.

🚍 Bus factor

The bus factor is “the minimal number of engineers that have to be hit by a bus for a project to be stalled”.‍[⇣] It's 1 for all three and they address it here: Mataroa, Bear, and Pagecord via mail:

“Good question. Bus factor 1, but since it's open source I do plan to make it clearer how it would be maintained in the event of my untimely death. Good nudge for me on this one. Many major indie products are bus factor 1.”

I left this out of the main section because I think: (1) it doesn't matter that much to the non-technical audience—they all have the same factor anyway, (2) there's an export function to save content, (3) judging by how lightweight all of these sites are and (4) by the trustworthy impression of the devs after my reaching out, I consider it unlikely they wouldn't find worthy maintainers in posterity.

However, if something were to happen and a hosting site eventually goes offline, then one loses all interactions such as likes and comments. More importantly, unless one uses a custom domain name, then every link on the Web that points to one's blog will stop working, i.e., a 404 Not Found error.

Sources

  1. The earliest TinEye trace leads back to a Polish website maluetar.soup.io of a user named Maluetar, but the original page seems forever lost.
  2. Annie Mueller: How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.
  4. Indieweb.org: POSSE.
  5. ACM Digital Library: Bus factor in practice.

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