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.