UseInkWell

Inkwell is a free, open-source, self-hosted blogging platform built on ASP.NET Core 10 and SQL Server. One install runs many blogs: it is multi-tenant by default, so each tenant gets its own domain, theme and writers while you maintain a single deployment.

Writing: a Quill WYSIWYG editor with drafts, scheduling and revision history, or write any post or page in Markdown. Series and collections group multi-part guides, an editorial review workflow adds "In review" and "Needs changes" states, and a navigation menu manager controls header and footer menus in every layout.

Design: a Layouts and Presets theming system with 20 layouts and 16 colour presets, typography-first, server-rendered HTML with a dark colour scheme for both the admin desk and the reader site.

Search and AI visibility: rich structured data with a pre-publish schema linter, author E-E-A-T profile pages, answer capsules, an answer-engine readiness score per post, IndexNow instant indexing, Google Search Console integration, an internal-link suggester, site-wide link audit, redirects manager with a 404 worklist, and AI-crawler analytics showing which answer engines read your site.

Audience: built-in moderated comments with a structural spam gate (no word lists, no external service), newsletter sending to confirmed subscribers over your own SMTP with one-click unsubscribe and no tracking pixels, and cookie-free first-party page-view counting that ignores crawlers.

Migration and ownership: one-click WordPress and Ghost importer with dry-run preview, WebP conversion and preserved redirects; export back to WordPress (WXR) or Ghost; whole-site backup to a single restorable ZIP.

Operations: two-factor sign-in with recovery codes, self-service password reset, built-in error monitor with email alerts, IP firewall that scores and blocks hostile traffic, AI-crawler identity verification, a built-in job scheduler (no cron needed), and a Docker Compose stack with SQL Server and automatic HTTPS via Caddy.

No telemetry, no vendor lock-in, MIT licensed. Because it runs entirely on your own infrastructure, you control where visitor data lives, which makes GDPR compliance straightforward.