Hosting a writefreely.org instance

markstos , 29 days ago

Ghost is working on adding ActivityPub to their self-hostable blog software now.

StrawberryPigtails , 29 days ago

It’s not difficult to self host. Pretty light on resources. Documentation on how to do so could use some work though. I believe I used a docker image to get up and running.

The main reason I personally don’t allow public signups on my instance is that US law is rather chaotic. If section 230 gets cancelled or repealed I don’t want to be held responsible for what some random person chose to write. It may not be a big risk at the moment but I don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with it.

poVoq , 29 days ago

Easy to run, but for some reason it attracts a lot of spammers if you have open registration.

Guadin OP , 29 days ago

Ah, that's what my guess was. It couldn't be that people just gave up on hosting it.

ruud , 29 days ago

I did register writefreely.world planning to host that one day, but I need some more selfhosting nerds to help out running all these instances :-) The foundation is now already running a few dozen Fedi instances :-D

Guadin OP , 29 days ago

That's funny I just looked at your site and vacancies today. I do not qualify for any of those spots though. You've got an impressive amount of services build up. Keep up the good work!

sxan , 29 days ago

:shrug:

It’s trivial to host yourself, and super light on resources. Personally, I don’t use it; for blogging I write markdown and rsync it over to the server where Hugo picks it up and turns it into a blog. Now that I think about it, I should probably go shut my WriteFreely down. I have a few pages on it, but I hate web app interfaces, so I didn’t put much content in it.

Guadin OP , 29 days ago

Thanks, I was also doubting about Hugo but came about writefreely as well.

sxan , 29 days ago

It depends on how you want to write. If you want to use a web interface, WriteFreely is decent. If you like your text editor, Hugo is fantastic.

thegreekgeek , 29 days ago

Literally just set one up yesterday on neocities, it was surprisingly easy. Of course then I managed to break it because I’m not as familiar with git as I’d like to be lol.

theshatterstone54 , 29 days ago

Is Hugo good for, say, a portfolio website? I know its good for blogging, but I’ve been thinking about a simple portfolio website hosted on Gitlab pages (I wish I could selfhost, but I can’t due to a lack of hardware and restrictions from my student accommodation and their network policy), and was wondering if Hugo would be a good choice for a portfolio website, maybe just having one page per project or something like that?

sxan , 29 days ago

Hugo isn’t a server, per se. It’s basically just a template engine. It was originally focused on turning markdown into web pages, with some extra functionality around generating indexes and cross-references that are really what set it apart from just a simple rendering engine. And by now, much of its value is in the huge number of site templates built for Hugo. But what Hugo does is takes some metadata, whatever markdown content you have, and it generates a static web site. You still need a web server pointed at the generated content. You run Hugo on demand to regenerate the site whenever there’s new content (although, there is a “watch” mode, where it’ll watch for changes and regenerate the site in response). It’s a little fancier than that; it doesn’t regenerate content that hasn’t changed. You can have it create whatever output format you want - mine generates both HTML and gmi (Gemini) sites from the same markdown. But that’s it: at its core, it’s a static site template rendering engine.

It is absolutely suitable for creating a portfolio site. Many of the templates are indeed such. And it’s not hard to make your own templates, if you know the front-end technologies.