Looking through the writefreely.org instances on their website, a lot of the links are dead or closed for registration. The one that is open and working is promoting a paid version. Is hosting a writefreely instance heavy on resources, attracting the wrong people or just not “cool” enough?
It’s extremely light to run, and very easy to install and upgrade. I ran one for just myself without open registrations. The only con is that the community (self-hostable) version doesn’t allow js due to “safety reasons” so in order to have something like comments for your blog you have to either perform several janky CSS hacks or adjust the source code yourself. The only reason I chose wf was because of federation, but I eventually switched to standard WordPress with the federation plugin and now have comments and whatever else I want.
Good to know it doesn’t have all the functions. Feels more and more that they would like to make money out of it. Which is fine, but then I feel less inclined to help them serve the fediverse.
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 If section 230 gets cancelled or repealed I don’t want to be held responsible for what some random person chose to write.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.
Easy to run, but for some reason it attracts a lot of spammers if you have open registration.
Ah, that’s what my guess was. It couldn’t be that people just gave up on hosting it.
: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.
Thanks, I was also doubting about Hugo but came about writefreely as well.
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.
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.
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?
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.
