Pico VS WriteFreely

I'm cooking up a really cheap publishing solution using Pico CMS ("stupidly simple") and rsync or something from my Obsidian Vault to my PHP server.

I'm using https://picocms.org/.

It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster.

The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you.

For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance).

For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at [email protected]" approach.

I like PicoCMS a lot.

Have you tried Pico? No database required and. You can either use Markdown or plain text for posting. Each post is just a file... https://picocms.org/

Ever since version 2.0, Les Pas has been able to share albums with other Nextcloud users, you can even co-edit the same album with others if you publish the album as 'Joint Album'. But how about people not in your Nextcloud server, like those friends who attended your wedding? Create temporary guest accounts for them is just not feasible. Photo blog is here to help! And luckily, we have Pico, the stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS, which happens to have a very good Nextcloud [app]((https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/cms_pico), enable us to publish our own blogs.

You can try Pico CMS. But if you have the time, try Hugo. The latter has a learning curve, and the docs are frustratingly non-beginner friendly, but once you get the basics, there is no going back!

Pico

For a blog, Pico can do the trick, and it's really handy to use (it uses Twig as template engine that's one of the best part for me).

Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc.

Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.

Write Freely, open source writing space

Docs - https://writefreely.org/

It's all about federation, in these federated networks all these servers talk to eachother and exchange messages about stuff going on on the servers. So it's easy to set up a hidden service for the webui of one of them, but it's sometimes quite obscure to try and set up the federation for one of them. It depends on what settings they honor and what other types of encryption and authentication they require and stuff. But, if you put some effort in ahead of time, you can make it really simple: I don't know how to do it in rust(lemmy is written in rust), but here's a neat example of how to do it in Go: https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/710 which requires no complicated configuration.

An alternative to Plume is WriteFreely, which is a pretty clean & simple experience. Just don't expect to much regarding customization.

I also wish write.as were more popular. It's like old Medium, but less popular but with a more reader-friendly business model and self-host-able (AGPL v3)

And since you've mentioned you want to write a blog, take a look at WriteFreely: https://writefreely.org/