I’m aware there’s an XKCD about standards. (There are 14 different variations? I’ll make one which includes all of that and it’ll be better. There are 15 different variations.)

But all I wanted was an invite-only website where I could post some photos (and the occasional short video) and invite my family and friends to follow along. I did not want an iPhone app that GPS tracks my location. I just wanted, effectively, a tiny little blog for travel. It’s opinionated about restraint: no ads, no tracking, no growth-hacking, no dark patterns — software that’s calm and on my side. This is the beautiful open Web at its best…

Private by default, not as an afterthought — Invite-only from the ground up — no public index, no search-engine footprint, no “oops, that was public the whole time.” Multiple independent spaces (“travelogues”) under one account — separate trips, separate audiences, separate guest lists. Self-hosted and dependency-light — my photos live on my server, not in someone else’s data business.

Sign in the way you actually want to — Passwordless email links, passwords, Google, or passkeys / Touch ID — pick any, mix freely, change your mind later. Every method stacks on one identity; no account fragmentation. A real account-settings page: change your email (with re-verification), see your active sessions, sign out everywhere, or delete yourself cleanly.

Posting that gets out of your way — Drag-and-drop photos, many at once, uploading live while you write. Automatic web-resizing, thumbnails, EXIF-orientation fixes, and in-browser HEIC conversion — no “please export as JPEG” friction. iPhone videos transcode themselves in the background to a format that plays everywhere, poster frame included. Per-photo captions and drag-to-reorder; Markdown when you want it, plain text when you don’t.

A reading experience designed for the follower, not the feed — A calm one-post-at-a-time reader and a full timeline — no infinite scroll, no engagement tricks. Per-reader “what’s new since you last looked,” with a summary of what actually changed. Threaded replies. Opt-in “there are updates” email digests with genuine one-click unsubscribe — notifications that respect the recipient.

Sharing that feels like handing someone a photo — Turn any single photo into a private, self-expiring share link — no account required on the other end. Collect a batch and send them in one email, in your own words, from your own address. Time-boxed by design (links lapse on their own) so sharing doesn’t quietly become forever.

Quietly capable underneath — Owner controls: approve/decline followers per space, one-off invite links, a site-wide announcement banner. An admin dashboard plus a private activity feed (RSS) across every space. Background job processing, schema that migrates itself on deploy, and a test suite behind it — boring in the ways infrastructure should be.

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