Our philosophy

97 Journals dev blog | Jan. 9, 2025, 2:01 p.m.

I had the idea for 97 journals because I wanted an easy platform to write. Just log in, write something, maybe publish it, and share it with a few people, then log out.

I get a kick out of people using my software so I thought, if I'm looking for a platform like this, maybe other people are too.

Earning money

Ideally, 97 journals will never accept payments from users of this service. I want to create the perfect platform for writing, and no doubt, if payments were taken there would be more pressure to add features.

I don't want features to get in the way of what's important - reading and writing.

The idea is to keep features that are expensive to maintain to a minimum, which will in turn, keep costs down.

Saving text to the web is virtually free, 

97 journals is built on my favourite web framework, Django. It's server side rendered meaning it's easy to update, fix, debug and there is no unnecessary technologies to do something that Django can do out of the box, like render a set of web pages.

I want this platform to be transparent. Well have a stats page where you can see the totally amount of blogs, blog posts, visitors, etc. 

This platform won't be for sale, if it has 10,000 users or 1 billion users. 

Enshitification will not happen here.

Won't you get bored of working on building this?

Hopefully not. One of the reasons I'm building this is so it gives me something to talk about on social media. I'm terrible at self promotion, so I'm hopeful that if I'm talking about something that I think everyone can benefit from, I'll talk about it more and I'll blog more.

If nothing else, I can talk about the development of this platform!