Create a site

User guide — all chapters

Start with a name

On iPhone and iPad, tap + at the top of the sites list; the very first time, the welcome screen offers Create Your First Site. On the Mac choose New Site… in the site switcher or the File menu. You can be writing inside a minute.

Field	What to enter
Site Title	The name that appears on the finished site, for example Field Notes.
Description	Optional. A short line about what the site is. It is shown on the site and used in its feeds.
Author	Optional. Your name. The RSS feed names you as the author of each post, and the copyright line at the foot of every page credits you. Without one, the copyright line uses the site’s title.
Kind of site	Blog, Photo journal, Notes or Essays. See below.
Welcome draft	A short draft showing how formatting and photos work, to read and then delete. It is switched on for your first site.

WORTH KNOWING

The description and author are set here, when the site is made. Site Settings can change the title later, but it has no field for these two yet, so it is worth getting them right now.

Choose the kind of site

A new site doesn’t start blank. The kind you choose picks a free theme that suits it and adds starter pages. You can change the theme, and delete or rewrite the pages, whenever you like.

Kind	Starts with
Blog	The Default theme, with About and Now pages.
Photo journal	The Modern theme, with an About page.
Notes	The Sky theme, with About and Now pages.
Essays	The Classic theme, with an About page.

The starter pages and the welcome draft are drafts. Nothing from either goes online until you mark it Published and publish the site.

If you already have a blog, choose Import a Site… on the same screen instead. It restores a Selfish export, or brings a site in from WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Medium, Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, Obsidian or any blog’s address. Import a site covers each one.

Tell it where the site will live

One field matters before you publish. It is in Site Settings → Site:

Field	What to enter
Site URL	The public address readers will reach, for example `https://fieldnotes.example`. Selfish builds canonical links, the sitemap, `robots.txt`, the feeds and link previews from it, so a wrong value here is a wrong value in every one of them.

Without a site address there is no feed, no sitemap and no link previews. The site check on the publish screen reminds you if it is missing.

TIP

On a free host you may not know the address until the site exists. Publish once, take the *.netlify.app, *.pages.dev or *.github.io address you are given, put it in Site URL, and publish again. If you have your own domain, the custom domains page shows the DNS records it needs.

Language and time zone

Site Settings → Site → Language & Dates sets two things for the whole site.

Language is the language of the words Selfish adds to your pages, such as “Read more”, “Older posts” and the “Page not found” page, and of your dates. It also sets each page’s lang and the language your feeds declare. Your own writing isn’t translated.
Time Zone is the zone your dates are written in, whichever device you publish from.

A new site takes the language and time zone of the device it was made on. The wording comes in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese in Simplified and Traditional characters.

Where everything else is

Site Settings has five screens. Changes apply when you choose Save.

Screen	What it holds
Site	Title and address, language and dates, the home page and archives, post pages, photos, the footer, a podcast, profile images, privacy, the Selfish directory, your data (export, duplicate, a Markdown copy, storage, archive), and Delete Site.
Theme	The theme gallery and each theme’s options. See Themes and design.
Menu	The links at the top of every page. See Pages, menu and home page.
Readers & Links	Your links elsewhere, reply and subscribe by email, Mastodon and Bluesky, Webmention and search engines. See Readers, feeds and links.
Publishing	Where the site goes. See the publishing docs.

Write the first post

Tap + (on the Mac, New Post), give the post a title, and write. Write a post covers the composer. When you are ready for the world to see it, open Details, set Status to Published, and choose Publish Site (on the Mac, Publish). If the site has nowhere to go yet, the publish screen offers Configure Publishing to Upload, which asks where your site should live.