My new website will be https://topposts.net, which will be (for now) for me to post on and you to read/follow via RSS/JSON. My hope is to support guest posts at some point in the future, but I have a lot more to build first.
I wrote a little CMS that sits on top of Eleventy, providing web-based posting so I don't have to think about creating the right little file with the right little metadata and making a git commit and so on. It's called octobug because it's obviously taking a lot of inspiration from cohost in terms of ergonomics but the way it operates is with one platform running the whole thing: GitHub.
There are lots of reasons to dislike GitHub and I totally understand why some people would consider this a dealbreaker but after messing around with at least a dozen options in the last 10 days I landed on this as a starting point:
- I like the output that 11ty produces, it's got a good ecosystem and what seems like a decent maintainer
- using GitHub means that the "posting API" (GitHub's REST API), the source file storage (a GitHub git repo), the processing (GitHub Actions), and the hosting (GitHub Pages) all happen in one place, with one account. The entire website is static, the only “compute” required happens either in your browser (a small amount of JS to send your posts to GitHub via their API) or inside docker containers running on GitHub Actions using two pre-defined actions with zero config required. Because I leave the github repo public it all costs $0 to operate, I only have to pay for the domain name.
- in theory I can use some mechanisms of GitHub's API auth + git's concept of a "committer" to support guest posts in the future. This one is a bit more handwavey but I'm focusing on other features first like drafts and media attachments and so forth.
- if there's something I really want to do before I build support for it in the web interface, I can always just edit the git repo itself and let 11ty build it. There's no interface for editing or deleting posts in the octobug web admin yet. But I can do that via GitHub. There's no way to upload images to posts. But 11ty supports it just fine if I use the git repo.
- this could (maybe, someday) be something that other people could use. I've tried to document the full setup process, though I have now spent a significant portion of the last 24 hours customizing my fork of the base software project / 11ty template to make my website look nicer.
It's fun to build scrappy software and start testing it out and thinking about what to do next. I'm glad I ended up building something new, even if it's mostly leveraging already existing things. It's fun to just freely copy details from cohost, because I don't know much about the "design" part of web design, and I feel okay about it because I'm just making a thing for myself. And I REALLY love seeing all the other things so many other people I follow are building and making notes in my TODO.md about their ideas that I want to steal!
