I'm kind of interested in WriteFreely at the moment, if I wanted to start something up. Seems like a good tool to write stuff and make it easily accessible on the Fediverse.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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great suggestion i'll look into it, seems perfect for my sbc server
I've used it for a long time, great tool! The wordsmith instance iirc.
Interesting project. I would have suggested that @bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml join your mastodon instance since you get 2000 characters per "toot" (weird choice of word tbh), which is not bad at all for shorter writings and you can arrange them into a thread.
The problem with having a blog or any platform is getting people to read you, social media is a powerful tool to get eyes on your content.
Substack is also becoming very popular, I think because you manage your blog space however you like.
And on ProleWiki we're looking at opening a sort of blog space too for our editors to replace the legacy essays page (which is just a page with a table in it). But you'll need an editor account and we have no release date at all, we're still playing around with the idea.
Easy+free option might be making a static site on github. Basically you write your posts in some easy to write format like markdown and then run a command to generate the HTML from it, then commit the whole thing to a git repository. Look up "static site generator" for various tools to help you do that. The site'll be hosted on your-username.github.io. Unlimited flexibility as you can tweak the styles and how the generation happens as you want and there's virtually no limits as long as you're just posting text and the occasional image. A lot of programmer blogs I've seen are run this way but ofc can write about whatever you want on there :)
Making a website is cool, but don’t forget about the most important thing: content! You can start writing now, and save your work in Word/Writer/Notepad/whatever until you’ve found or built a place online to publish it.
Personally, I like going from the ground up. Spin up an nginx instance and write some basic html and css. It will teach you a lot about the web and gives you a lot of creative freedom.
yea this is what i was thinking, still a bit scary to have a port open to the public internet lol. need to research more.
If you can rent a cheap VPS. I host a blog myself, if you have more questions about the hosting process, you can DM me.
My advice is to choose whether you want to focus on writing or on learning how to set up the infrastructure for the website. If it is the former then go for something like writefreely or proprietary platforms like medium, substack, github pages etc.
I'd personally avoid Medium as they're quite unfriendly from a privacy perspective, though front-ends such as Scribe exist. Something deployable like Hugo would be the best variant imo, or making it by hand if you're into that.
There is also codeberg pages instead of github pages that is likely more privacy friendly.
Yeah, I know about Codeberg. Though I know they removed that anti-Cloudflare project, which is odd. I don't know more about it, though I remember the devs of that project made a lot of drama with Codeberg.
You could also rent a VPS and make a Wireguard tunnel between your homeserver and the VPS, thus not exposing your home network.
My only experience is having a Tumblr, which is in many ways better than the usual big name social medias, but in many ways is just as poisonous in a very subtle and pernicious way.