Bonjour Tout le Monde!
In which we introduce this project briefly.
Wanted a bit of a teeny weekend project away from feeling anxious about the world (ahem, lots happening). Decided to hand-craft a Ghost instance out of nothing. Had a few aims:
- Needs to be a good CMS: write in Markdown, ideally with WYSIWYG, and publish immediately for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. Ideally through mobile as well.
- Free (as in freedom):
- No vendor lock-in: Yup. No platform that tolerates or promotes objectionable stuff. (Do I need to elaborate)
- No country lock-in: We are in 2026. This is new. Want to be able to be nimble should there be restrictions because some despot did not like what he sees here. (Ha, you'll never guess which country I'm referring to!)
- Free (as in liberating): Trying to find my own voice without a professional lens, or something calculated to engage algorithms or masses.
- Free (as in beer): Cheap-ish. That's less than SGD 10. Not... what Ghost Pro charges.
- Easy to do: Scripting/ configuring is fine, but Sunday afternoon, yo. Nothing more.
- Multilingual: నేను ఐదు భాషలలో వ్రాయగలను. Je peux ecrire en cinq langues. You get what I'm sayin'.
- Newsletter: I'm a bit old-school and use RSS feeds, but email newsletter seems to be the in-thing now, eh. Better this than push notifications or gasp agentic AI trying to grab your attention while you're chatting with ChatGPT or watching TikTok videos or some such.
So we have a neat solution here: custom Ghost instance in a server colocated in a country with good privacy laws. And if something funny happens, well, I have a script ready to migrate things away.
I haven't turned on newsletters as yet, but that's more of a Day 2 thing. Next weekend or the weekend after. Let's get some posts here first!