Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own “sections” (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and I apologize for not knowing how to describe this well. I’ve just been searching and searching and I don’t know what to look up to find what I want, it’s extremely frustrating. Any help is greatly appreciated.
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https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ If it’s just text, you can probably make a static HTML website and accomplish your goals. I’m not sure what format it’s in now but Markdown is what I use and then just export to HTML.
If you just want to host epub (or equivalent files), you can still make a static page and link to them with Cloudflare Pages, GitHub.io, or one of many free static page hosting sites.
You can probably throw together a pretty simple wordpress website without much knowledge. Just keep it mostly out of the box, maybe change the theme.
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If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I’d just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.
In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.
Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.
Not aware of a FOSS 1:1, but that sounds like Ghost or your blogging platform of choice.
Except WP, if self hosting, IMHO. Wordpress == PHP == trouble and risk. I don’t mean to malign WP specifically, but if you’re a noob, you want to avoid exposing PHP to the public internet - especially if there’s any possibility you’ll eventually forget about maintaining and upgrading.
Just too damn easy for some threat actor to come along and exploit a vuln you missed, in the software or the web server or WP.
That said, years of WP taught me that, roughly, you want “pages” linking to “posts” ( == chapters). In theory, the former is a permanent reference and the latter is dynamic to some degree.
In reality, the existence of search engines before enshittification means the two have been conflated frequently.
Pages would often get links in a sidebar or menu. Posts might get buried much farther down, but can also be linked to. They’re often, but not always, time—specific.
“2023 NY [financial product] Guide” (page) might well link to a years-old post about subrogation regarding an attempted BBQ of a random wild animal that went wrong and caused a fire, because it’s a positively classic example of the same that makes a great deal of sense to most people, even if they don’t understand terms like subrogation.
Post/page are distinctions that WP makes, but are abstractly relevant to setting up abs any CMS (which is what you want, Content Management System) so that you (ideally) never have to figure out how or where to link something, its just native. Changing the structure means changing the URLs which is annoying at best, and fraught with peril at worst.
Above 2023 xxxx Guide page, would be https://example.org/NY-Xxxx-Guide and that way you DGAF about the sidebar links, for instance. Link it once, and then you only have to update 50 posts with the year and/or some change in the data, which can be done programmatically in the db as a trivial exercise. “UPDATE page SET title = (SELECT title FROM… WHERE ‘2022’ in title TO ‘2023’;”
Disclaimer: do not run that query as copypasta, it’s meant to illustrate a point and not to exhibit valid SQL on any db (Not least because I intentionally left out at least one closing paren and simplified a bit. I’m a PG guy, and I am 100% certain it would fail as written, but fully expect anything approaching the standard to reject it. But you get the idea, update 50 states at once with a fairly simple query, once a year.
Lots going on here, but go for a modern CMS and repeatable updates, not a legacy product with a bunch of tech debt accumulated. Build it clean, plan it out first, and know whatever DB is backing it fairly well.
Grav.
I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.
I’m sorry. I thought I had replied to this. Yes. That Grav.
It sounds like you want a blog that lets you categorize or tag your entries to keep them together.
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Apart from all the online tools there are also offline website builders like blocs (macOS/iPad - but there are similar tools for Windows as well) that let you design your website and will spit out the files you then just need to upload to any provider of your liking. It’s basically a WYSIWYG static site generator.
Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.
This is good advice. Learn about markdown syntax, try Obsidian to write notes that can be interrelated in a network, add drawings, and export selected notes to HTML. You can further stylize all of them with some custom CSS. There are many “content management system” (CMS) like Obsidian does. I’d self host ghostwriter. But just search for a CMS on awesome self hosted list and find something popular that’s akin to you for whatever features or underlying tech (e.g. Wagtail for django web devs)
For something like this, I think I would use Hugo to generate a static site. You write the post using markdown then tell Hugo to regenerate the site.
If you want to publish and receive comments or feedback via the fediverse, you might take a look at WriteFreely. Simpler to use but more complicated to setup.
Wordpress is also an option, but I personally don’t like it much. I spend all my time playing with all the knobs and never actually publish anything.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#blogging-platforms
I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you’re using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are ‘wordpress security’ applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don’t know a whole lot about what you’re doing.
There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you’re webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the ‘stories’ as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.
Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.
Here’s a nice list of FOSS CMS’ (which includes Wordpress of course).
Others have suggested Markdown formats, if you’re willing to do that you might want to look at Silverbullet.
https://ghost.org/ would probably work pretty well for you.
What part of that is self hosted?
They have their own hosting plans, but you can also self host it.
I looked for that on their site but missed it and found the pricing instead. Thanks! I’m definitely going to check that out
The part where you self host it? I don’t understand the question.
Sorry, I didn’t find the self hosting option when I looked at the site. I see it now. Thanks!
Oh that’s what you mean, yeah they don’t make it easy to find. I only linked their site so OP could see the feature set. I run it in docker, and remove all the nonsense membership and newsletter features and buttons.
There is also writefreely. It is fairly basic, but says it supports “publish[ing] to multiple blogs from one account”. Haven’t really used it, but it looks kinda cool imo
It works nicely, but for some weird reason spammers really like it, so never open registrations on it.
