Ishill (pronounced[1]pronounced EE-sheell) is a publishing stack to enable people to go quickly from “I have an idea I want to hand out as a zine” to “I have a stack of zines.” It is named in honor of Joseph Ishill[2]Joseph Ishill, a printer.

Code?

• Example site hosted on GitLab Pages: https://ussjoin.gitlab.io/ishill-examplesite/[3]https://ussjoin.gitlab.io/ishill-examplesite/
  • Example site repository on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/ussjoin/ishill-examplesite[4]https://gitlab.com/ussjoin/ishill-examplesite
• Example site hosted on GitHub Pages: https://ussjoin.github.io/ishill-examplesite/[5]https://ussjoin.github.io/ishill-examplesite/
  • Example site repository on GitHub: https://github.com/ussjoin/ishill-examplesite[6]https://github.com/ussjoin/ishill-examplesite
• Example site hosted on Autistici/Inventati (A/I): https://www.autistici.org/ishill/[7]https://www.autistici.org/ishill/
• Theme repository on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/ussjoin/ishill[8]https://gitlab.com/ussjoin/ishill
• Theme repository on GitHub: https://github.com/ussjoin/ishill[9]https://github.com/ussjoin/ishill

Why?

Why do this? A few reasons.

• For one thing, it’s obnoxiously difficult to go from Markdown (or any simple text format) to zine. If it could fit on a minizine[10]minizine (so less than half a normally-printed page), great. If it can fit on one printed page, front and back, one can make a four-half-page brochure with a bit of mucking about in Word, Pages, or similar. After that, it’s not simple unless you have Adobe InDesign[11]Adobe InDesign or other dedicated (and very expensive) prepress software; as far as I’ve found, there’s no “happy path” for making the transition.
  • OK, technically The Anarchist Library Bookbuilder[12]The Anarchist Library Bookbuilder has this stack as well, but it doesn’t use Markdown or anything else popular, instead defaulting to something only known to the kind of people who use Emacs. Ain’t nobody got time for that, we want to publish zines!
• For another, Travis Goodspeed[13]Travis Goodspeed’s groundbreaking and iconic International Journal of Proof of Concept or Get the Fuck Out (POC||GTFO)[14]International Journal of Proof of Concept or Get the Fuck Out (POC||GTFO) introduced hackers to the idea that our research wasn’t immune from memoryholing, at the end of the day; a lot of people, myself included, learned about samizdat[15]samizdat from Travis. Zines have a lot of influences, but samizdat is certainly one of them.
  • I don’t think it’s a real surprise in 2025 that memory holing research and communcation is at top of mind for many communities.
• Why a website? Personally, when I find a zine that I like, I try to find the author and/or publishing collective to find more things that might be enjoyable, just as I do with authors. I wanted to make it as easy to publish a zine as a single blog post, and as easy to start a publisher as a blog site. If you don’t want the website parts, this is a bit overengineered, but you can still use it to generate your zines and print them.