Owning your words again

For years I moved my writing from platform to platform. Each move meant an export that lost something — the formatting, the links, the dates, sometimes a few posts entirely. Every time, I owned a little less of my own work.

The thing that finally stuck was the simplest: keep everything as plain files, in Git, and build a website out of them. There is no export step, because there is nothing to export from — the files are the site. If I ever want to leave, I already have everything.

plain is that idea, made a little nicer to live with. The files are still yours. The history is still yours. You can hand the whole repository to a friend, or to yourself in ten years, and it will still open.

That is the whole promise, really. Not speed, though it is fast. Not features, though there are enough. Just: your words, in files you control, for as long as you want them.