A zine from Magic Pages

A press of
your own

One argument in four parts, on publishing where nobody can change the terms on you.

Printed for: Indiecon 2026, Hamburg
4–6 September
Extent: 48 pages, A5
250 copies
Printing: One colour inside
Munken Print Cream 90 g
Checked: August 2026
Prices and policies move

Who made this

I am Jannis, the founder of Magic Pages. I wrote the four parts that follow.

Magic Pages is managed hosting for Ghost. There are three of us, we look after more than 1,500 independent sites, and we are one of this festival’s sponsors.

So I am not neutral: I would like you to own a domain, and I would not mind hosting it.

But that is not why I wrote this. I think anybody who makes something should be online at an address where the terms cannot be changed on them later. Whether you do that with us, with one of our competitors, or on a server in your own cupboard is all the same to me.

Two of the five publications in Part Three are our customers. They are marked as such.

If you find something wrong in these pages, I would genuinely like to know.

help@magicpages.co

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, Bad Ischl, August 2026

This is one argument in four parts, and they refer to each other. Read them in order if you can.

Sources Before you print the address Colophon

Sources

Every claim was checked against a primary source in August 2026. Where a company’s own documentation contradicted a secondary report, the documentation won.

Part One — A press of your own

Medium’s metered paywall: Medium’s own help pages.
Export matrix: every cell checked 17 August 2026 against each platform’s own documentation or, where that is silent, its source.
Tumblr, “Export your blog”: drafts, private and hidden posts; a Media folder of the original files. Medium, “Export your account data”: posts, comments and drafts as HTML, images left on Medium’s CDN. Substack: no media assets in the zip; no name column in the subscriber CSV, Ghost’s importer for it requiring only email, active_subscription, expiry, email_disabled and created_at. Patreon: audience email export and Post Insights CSV only, with no documented export of the posts.
WordPress, “Tools Export screen”: the WXR file, Status defaulting to All Status; the importer’s “Download and import file attachments”, which fetches media from the original site. Ghost, “Exporting content and data” and “Importing content”: the JSON, the members CSV including name, images by shell access or a zip from the host — a managed-hosting problem, since self-hosting either one puts the files on your own disk — and drafts included because the exporter selects whole tables unfiltered.
Getting images back afterwards: the asset scraper in @tryghost/migrate, which works only while the original server answers. Ghost pull request 29945, open 17 August 2026, adds a one-click archive behind a selfServeArchives flag — “everything except media, which stays reserved for the host (async) mode”.
Domain pricing: registrar list prices, August 2026.

Part Two — A short history of the home page

GeoCities neighbourhoods; Network Solutions pricing 1996–1999; ICANN 1998.
Splinder: Dada’s closure announcement, 22 November 2011, and its own front-page counter.
Blog.pl and Bloog.pl: Onet and Wirtualna Polska, early 2018.
Movable Type 3.0: Mena Trott, “It’s About Time”, Six Apart, 13 May 2004.
Mark Pilgrim, “Freedom 0”, 14 May 2004. Both this and the announcement above were read in the Internet Archive: neither is still at its published address.
Mambo to Joomla: the developers’ statement, August 2005.
b2/cafelog: Michel Valdrighi’s posts; Matt Mullenweg, 24 January 2003.
Ghost: Kickstarter closed 28 May 2013, £196,362 from 5,236 backers.
Ghost Foundation, Singapore. TYPO3 Association, Baar, Switzerland.
Automattic, Mullenweg and WP Engine: filings and orders, September–December 2024.

Part Three — Five places worth visiting

kottke.org registered December 1998.
theapiarist.org publishing since 2013; about page read 13 August 2026, including paid subscriptions from 2024.
republik.ch: crowdfunded April 2017, publishing since January 2018, more than 30,000 members.
pluralistic.net: Doctorow’s POSSE method; the site’s own privacy policy.
dispatch-media.com launched 1 April 2025. All five addresses re-checked on 16 August 2026.

Part Four — Writing that lasts ten years

Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 27 June 2011, Alito concurring, footnotes 14 and 15; all three cited addresses tested over HTTP on 16 August 2026.
Zittrain, Albert and Lessig, Harvard Law Review Forum, 2014: law journal articles and Supreme Court opinions.
Bowers, Stanton and Zittrain, 2021: 553,693 New York Times articles, 2.3 million outbound links, 4,500 hand-checked.
Wallace Koehler, Information Research, 2004: 361 pages, December 1996 to May 2003.
Pew Research Center, May 2024: just under a million pages sampled.
Library of Congress, 2011, on the 44-, 75- and 100-day claims.
The 236 blogs: 267 TrackBacks on the announcement above, stamped 13 May 2004, from 236 distinct blogs; read from the Internet Archive capture of 5 June 2004, and re-checked 15 August 2026.

Before you print the address

Spend half an hour once, and every copy you hand out keeps working.

The name

Buy it somewhere that isn’t your host, so one bad week can’t take both.
Check the renewal price, not the first year’s.
Turn auto-renew on, and put the expiry date in a calendar anyway.
Give the registrar a contact address that doesn’t end in the domain itself — if it lapses, that is where the warning goes.

The platform

Confirm it answers to your own name, on a plan you can afford, before you write anything.
Run the export on day one. Unzip it. Look for the pictures, the drafts and the names.
Ask whether you get subscribers’ names or only their email addresses.
Keep your own copy somewhere that opens without anybody’s permission.

Then print it.