[HN Gopher] It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Web...
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It Took Me a Decade to Find the Perfect Personal Website Stack -
Ghost+Fathom
Author : munchor
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-07-09 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidgomes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidgomes.com)
| idlewords wrote:
| This genre of post is really the internet equivalent of being an
| audiophile.
| umvi wrote:
| Or any type of connoisseur
| nicce wrote:
| I have been fighting a lot with Ghost.
|
| It is good if the provided features are good and enough for you..
| but if they aren't, then you are in trouble. I would like to note
| that Ghost is meant mostly for making content behind
| subscriptions, since they prioritize adding and improving their
| subscription features.
|
| The content is meant to be written by hand, with some
| limitations.
|
| Templating engine is limited, if you want to have some static
| pages. It is very difficult to generate something from custom
| data, other than your posts or pages. I wish Ghost had some
| custom key-value endpoint with their API, but instead if you want
| to add anything custom, it must be set to the custom
| configuration file, and it is very limited.
|
| Eventually, you need to embed JSON into JS and then generate some
| parts of the HTML on client side, what you would instead like to
| do these in server side. E.g. if you would like to show for
| example a table with data. Or you need to use some other static
| site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.
|
| Something very simple, but yet so difficult.
|
| I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for
| Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly
| read operation, but they are officially dropping support for
| production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was,
| that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.
|
| There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and
| also fully GDPR compliant: https://plausible.io/
| bhaney wrote:
| > I actually pay Ghost roughly 200 euros per year
|
| > I just write them in Notion, and then I copy-paste them into
| the Ghost editor
|
| > every now and then I have to hack some CSS together to fix some
| bugs
|
| > the theme can only be compiled with an ancient version of npm
|
| > the code is really messy, so at some point I won't be able to
| maintain it any longer
|
| > images don't work very well with my theme
|
| To each their own, but to me this sounds like an absolutely
| terrible "website stack"
| ashton314 wrote:
| That is a lot of money. I'm glad this guy has the income to
| sustain that. Pray tell: why spend so much on analytics? _I_ have
| some analytics for my blog, but it's little more than something
| to satisfy my curiosity, so I can get away with simple page
| counts.
| superkuh wrote:
| I settled on my perfect stack 2 decades ago. nginx with .html and
| .jpg/.png/etc files in directories on a file system on my home
| computer with port 80 forwarded (20 years ago it was thttp). For
| templating I use server side includes which are the perfect
| balance of utility/expressiveness and a minimal attack surface
| with no mantainance burden.
|
| Having it on my home computer also gives me massive storage space
| and ease of editing. The only cost is ~$10/yr for the .com
| domain. DNS hosting is free from zoneedit (they've been great the
| last 20 years).
| EGreg wrote:
| So you have to have your computer always on?
|
| How does the DNS thing work? They use a DynDNS client on your
| computer or what
| flandish wrote:
| I do similar but with hugo markdown and a git repo linked with
| cloudfare - then it's hosted on their static free hosting.
| rootw0rm wrote:
| zola + free oracle tier for me
|
| https://github.com/getzola/zola
| mattl wrote:
| I just wish Movable Type was still maintained under the GPL. It
| was basically perfect.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| I vaguely remember that movable type was difficult to set up
| and deploy. Why did it lose to Wordpress?
| mattl wrote:
| It was proprietary and around the same time WP became popular
| they changed their license terms to become way worse.
|
| I suggested the GPL in person to one of the founders (perhaps
| not very nicely at the time) and eventually it happened. Not
| for long, but by then the founders had left and SixApart was
| run from their Japanese subsidiary
| embit wrote:
| I have been using same tech stack for last 10 years happily.
| LAMP. And can't be happier. And I use it for everything I do
| cloverich wrote:
| I briefly used Fathom and think they are great, especially if you
| are hosting a static site on something like Github pages, or some
| other equivalent. Yet I regret that I can't get free server-side
| analytics. My pages are being served by a server, I just want it
| to count logs for me. If I ever move back to a self-hosted
| solution, I'd definitely love to give something like goaccess[1]
| a try.
|
| Any static hosting sites that provide this for free today?
|
| [1]: https://brandur.org/minimal-analytics
| rootw0rm wrote:
| for just tracking visits on a toy site, i use OpenResty + a bit
| of Lua and Redis, doesn't require cookies or javascript. never
| stress tested it tho
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(page generated 2023-07-09 23:00 UTC)