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May 29, 2025

Its been few months since I covered these Tools for forms/newsletters

Now, how to built great products?

What it is our potential client? What does it values the most? what are their pain points?

Given that you have a cool website, already with web analytics.

People are reading, so…what are they interested at?

You got to know about that thanks to a newsletter/forms.

From those I enjoyed formbricks and Mailerlite, which can be integrated with Gsheets/cal/webhooks as seen here

Formbricks Results

Or maybe you had some kind of waiting list in place…

You could do those with a simple flask + formbricks/mailerlite/logto…

Motivation

Recently I got to read a blog about the CEO of ghost

Ghost Post Summary 📌

This article celebrates Ghost’s 12th anniversary, reflecting on its journey from an idealistic open-source project to a successful business with $8M in annual recurring revenue and a team of 34.

The founder, who started Ghost at 24, initially aimed to provide independent publishers with a dedicated open technology stack.

This was a response to the rise of media companies like Vox and BuzzFeed, whose proprietary software gave them a significant advantage over traditional outlets.

Ghost sought to empower creators and newsrooms to compete without being beholden to closed platforms like Facebook and Medium.

Over the past 12 years, Ghost has consistently focused on building tools for web publishing, particularly helping creators build sustainable businesses through features like paid subscriptions. This focus has led to over $100 million earned by independent media businesses using Ghost.

The author expresses pride in Ghost’s achievements as a small, independent non-profit competing with large, VC-funded platforms.

The article concludes by noting a growing appetite for independent solutions and announces the upcoming release of Ghost 6.0, a significant step forward for the platform. Ghost is also hiring for remote positions.

And the quote was just so resonating:

‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’

So….why not trying something similar?

Similar as in these Selfhosted Tools:

Or like this no code platform for landing webpages: https://www.producthunt.com/products/tilda-publishing

During early spring I tested Dokploy, which does kind of that - Wrap apps into Traefik to expose them.

But that’s not niche enough. Which app are you offering? all of them? none of them?

So Dokploy would more a PaaS offering.

And an alternative to Ghost would have to keep it simple.

Similar to Ghost in scope (just web) but:

Keeping OSS
No database required - Your flat files, your rules. Easier to migrate.
Even cooler themes
Greener to serve

mindmap
  root((Web Publishing & Tools))
    CMS
      KeystaticCMS
      TinaCMS
    Static Hosting
      Cloudflare Pages
      Netlify/Vercel
      Firebase
    SSG
      Hugo
      Astro
      Gatsby
    Authentication
      Firebase Auth
      Auth0
      Supabase Auth
    HTTPS
      Traefik
      NginxPM
      Caddy

People out there say that its all about shipping: 4/70 projects went into something - https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

The Components and Idea

It’s all combined on this project:

Web GenerAItor

Tinkering with the 5 components to server better webs

The CMS

Markdown edition is fine, but…some tools? 📌

You need markdown for these SSGs. And there are cool markdown tools:

https://github.com/Cveinnt/LetsMarkdown.com

docker run --rm -dp 3030:3030 cveinnt/letsMarkdown

https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger

MIT | The last Markdown editor, ever.

I first had a look to reddit:

And after that I consolidated the CMS alternatives, focusing on these two (for their simplicity)

LinkStack was really interesting, with themes, authentication…

But it needs a server for the viewers.

So ideally, it would be server just for edition, static for users.

Which is what the Treelink project does out-of the box as we saw on this post - The only missing piece would be the authentication, so that only logged in can make changes

Treelink Astro

The only thing the theme need is a Flask App so that people generates its config!

DecapCMS

git clone https://github.com/JAlcocerT/Portfolio

#hugo server
#hugo server --bind="0.0.0.0" --baseURL="http://192.168.0.117" 
hugo server --bind="0.0.0.0" --baseURL="http://192.168.1.11" --port=1313

YOu might need some vibe code help:

can we try to implement decapCMS to work with this repo? I dont want to use any netlify service, my goal is to have a UI where the content of the hugo theme can be edited via UI and then just commit changes

Check that http://192.168.1.11:1313/admin/config.json

npm install -g netlify-cms-proxy-server
npx netlify-cms-proxy-server

With vibe coding - is possible.

Its just that…you will need Github OAUTh and stuff.

Do you want to give people OAUTH access to your actual github account?

Im not sure yet about that.

TinaCMS

https://tina.io/

Tina Cloud

Mechanism project docs

Astro Celestial Theme x TinaCMS Setup

Astro Ltree

Astro Theme LTree

I great working sample with TinaCMS Cloud: https://app.tina.io/projects

Astro Theme Ltree and TinaCMS | Step by Step with Snapshots 📌

Following the original theme instructions: https://darko.io/posts/linktree-and-linkinbio-clone-with-astro-and-tinacms

https://github.com/DBozhinovski/astro-theme-ltree

alt text

KeyStaticCMS

Authentication

This one will require your focus: https://darko.io/posts/but-auth-is-hard

As per my recent post, you have few options, like:

TinaAuth
LogTo

TinyAuth

To get this right, first we need to have a proper Traefik Setup, that routes both:

The built website to a given sub/domain with https
The editor/admin panel into another sub/domain/static route - That only the website owner can access

Web GenerAItor

Traefik Setup for HUGO Lynx Theme

Traefik on a SubDomain Routing HUGO Dev Server

The theme im using is Lynx, and you can get an avatar thanks to Avartartion

LogTo

I was playing around with LogTo few months ago, together with Streamlit, here.

But I did not quite manage to get where I wanted.

LogTo Authentication

Just recently…I got some inspiration, while doing this post.

And I can confirm that LogTo works great with Flask Apps, like the 3body webapp.

Conclusion

With the CMS -> giving people possibility to edit

And the authentication layer -> Knowing who is going to edit what…

You will want to know how it actually works for them, aka, where are the frictions in the app flow

Product First

Make sure you understand how to use funnels and Sankey diagrams.

Like this graph? Me too and its thanks to HUGO shortcodes x ChartJS - funnels

Product Analitycs Tools with Docker 🐋 ↗

Any Web or Webapp can potentially be Combined with PostHog/OpenReplay for Product Analytics

PostHog
OpenReplay

PostHog

To see how customers interact with your product, you can try with https://eu.posthog.com/

Add this kind of snippet before the </head> of your website, as done here:

    <script>
    //somethingsomething 
      posthog.init('phc_someid', {
          api_host: 'https://eu.i.posthog.com',
          person_profiles: 'identified_only', // or 'always' to create profiles for anonymous users as well
      })
  </script>