I'm starting a new blog. What indie hacker tools should I use?
So, I'm setting up a new blog, purely to focus on writing.
I'm so disillusioned about using bigger tools and ones that increasingly make me feel uncomfortable from a privacy/ethical perspective.
I'd love to intentionally support the indie hacker community with the tools I use,
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The one I saw here on IH the other day: Proseful (made by @sutherland). I really like it!
This looks slick. Do you know if you can use custom domains with it?
There is a paid plan that allows that!
ghost ?
I know I'm a bit late but I'm working on another analytics tool at plausible.io
At the moment the features are quite similar with simpleanalytics.io because it's all very basic. However, I'm sure we'll diverge more over time. You can check out feedback.plausible.io/roadmap to see where my project is going.
So here is some feedback from my experimenting (note that I am not a dev, but can set things up if needed):
Overall I mainly struggled to find a conversion focused setup with email opt-in. None of these actually a super friendly in 1 click setup for that. Gatsby has a plugin for mailchimp integration but basically, you always need to adjust some part of the code.
If anyone has found other alternatives, happy to listen! Instead, I actually went from setting up a blog to setting up a newsletter on Substack.
Hey @rosiesherry
You pretty much have them all. You might want to consider a link management tool.
What's a link management tool?
Ive run gatsy hugo middleman jekyll ghost wordpress and keep coming back to Ghost.org. then gatsby.
Ghost Super easy to write and zero config out of the box esprcially for meta and integration.. but their monthly is up there. There are other indie hacker s hosting ghost blogs at 15 month.
I love jamstack. Highly recommend netlify and zeit now too. If you are comfortable with git workflow then check out headlesscms.org gonna blow your mind the scripting speed.
Whoah proseful looks amazing. Way better price too 👋
I went for a static site generator — Hugo. You can host your site on s3 or even GitHub. For managing a Mailing List my only experience is with Mailchimp and so far so good.
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Yes they are both static site generators. And you do have some setup work to do to publish the site to s3, have your domain pointing to it, etc. But after that’s done you shouldn’t have to touch it again.
For example, I have everything automated in a way that nowadays I write and publish new posts from my iPad simply by creating a new Mardown file and pushing it to Git. Maybe I should write a post of my setup.
Would love to read that.
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Yep. I use an app called Working Copy.
ButterCMS is a good option if you want to build your own front end. Fairly easy to use
@rosiesherry - what did you finally choose for blogging? Ghost, Medium, Proseful...?
I believe Medium(https://medium.com/creators) is best for just authoring content and not worrying about hosting. Plus you get million of readers.
You can't set your own custom domain anymore.
It’s not made by an indie hacker though
I haven't used it myself, but @levelsio has tweeted good things about https://simpleanalytics.io/
Basically a minimalist and privacy-friendly Google Analytics, but you do have to pay $9/49 per month