Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.
It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)
I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.
This CMS is fast and works on mobile.
It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.
It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).
There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.
We have one of these locally, but it's called a community shed, to not exclude women arbitrarily. At the same time, I still think it's mostly used by men, as it's quite focused around woodworking etc.
They were one of the first businesses to use my CMS for one of their websites, so they hold a special place in my heart :)
I've recently been building a business directory using Bubble.io.
It took me about half a day to do tutorials and another half day playing around just to learn the platform.
After that, I was able to build this business directory, including Stripe payment integration, some reasonably advanced Google Maps and search / categorisation functionality.
Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so.
I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS.
Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly.
At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it.
It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it.
If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot.
Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning.
I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.
Do you happen to know anyone who managed to figure out what the electrical requirements for the cable are? We tried mounting the antenna outside and connecting the cable via an external box to the inside (using cat 6 cable), but Starlink immediately started complaining about a 'bad connection', which went away when we routed the cable to the power brick unimpeded. But it would really be much neater if we could use our own house's ethernet wiring. But evidently Starlink doesn't like it.
Pages doesn't allow for direct deployments. Has to go via git repo + webhooks.
We make static sites with our CMS and don't really want to integrate another thing into our workflow. Lots of CF and git API calls to automate the whole thing reliably. Thus, we're sticking with workers sites for now. Pages is an attractive offering, however.
DeviantArt was the first place where I shared photography, a very, very long time ago. My account still works, funnily enough. It was a great place that reminds me of the MySpace / wild west days of the earlier internet.
Never managed to get this to work on a laptop with an Intel 520 gpu and latest Linux Mint.
Deskreen isn't the problem. It's trying to create a virtual display.
You'll see my comments with my findings on on every github / stackoverflow discussion regarding the matter. There are a few.
Until there is a bullet proof way of creating virtual displays, Deskreen isn't of much use to someone with my use case. Which is a damn shame. I really wanted to use an iPad as 2nd screen.
I concur, many of my clients are 'rescues' from Wix and Wordpress and the only thing more hated than Wordpress is Wix.
More often than not it comes down to the horrifyingly confusing documentation, inconsistent UX, hilarious over-promising the world + dog on landing pages, etc.
Also, exfiltrating a website from Wix (changing the nameservers, which should take two seconds, like it does with any other hoster) is a huge ordeal. They make it very difficult.
I built it specifically to address shortfalls of other site builders:
- No themes
- Uses 'modules' rather than the strangely popular drag and drop thing with blocks and widgets (which then jumble about the page wildly when resizing). We have 40 modules at the moment and I keep building more.
- 100% mobile optimised. We hide no functionality and most page editing I tend to do side by side, with the CMS in a separate window next to the preview site
- The preview site updates automatically when you hit 'save' so that it can be viewed on many devices in real-time at the same time (and shared easily too)
- It's very fast. No React or other shenanigans. There is JS for the more complex interactions, but it's been applied sparingly. Doesn't work without JS though.
- Sites are deployed to Cloudflare Workers Sites. The SSG behind the scenes is Hugo
I don't advertise this thing anywhere and all my clients are word of mouth. I have yet to hear a single negative thing from anyone.
I live in the countryside so my clients are all pensioners who don't know computers. They've all had run-ins with WordPress and naturally hated it. (though I don't want to knock a properly setup WordPress, IMO you have to be technical to do it and my system is aimed specifically at non technical people)
I don't do shops and even blogs are probably not directly my target audience. But if you just need to make a simple site with pictures, videos and images (maybe a mailchimp signup, instagram gallery or Google calendar signup or showing some PDF newsletters), then I'd challenge you to do it faster in any other system.
I'm doing this on the side, so have no time to build websites, so it takes no time to build websites in my system :) (I've built a lot of websites for free and just end up collecting the hosting charge which is between £8-£13 a month, which is hopefully similar to some sitebuilders, but I can't compete with the £3 per month offerings that tie you into other services and immediately become more expensive as soon as you add any meaningful functionality.)
There are about a billion things I want to improve about it of course. It's certainly not perfect, but finding the time is a challenge. I hope to one day be able to make it my full time job.