The Autodidacts

Exploring the universe from the inside out

Your Voice, Online: Additional Resources

Platforms

Some sites with reviews of the different platforms

Inspiration

My revision checklist:
https://www.autodidacts.io/revision-checklist-for-essays-and-short-stories/

A free Grammarly alternative:
https://languagetool.org

Two nice text editors, one of which works in your browser:
https://zenpen.io/
https://ia.net/writer

Markdown tutorials:
https://commonmark.org/help/tutorial/
https://herman.bearblog.dev/markdown-cheatsheet/

An introduction to RSS:
https://www.autodidacts.io/what-is-rss/

A free online tool to crop images:
https://resizeimage.dev/

A free online tool to reduce the filesize of images:
https://bulkresizeimages.online/

A free online tool to convert image formats:
https://imageconverter.dev/

A free online tool to print and preview markdown:
https://markdowner.github.io/

Opinions about about getting feedback and iterating effectively:
https://www.autodidacts.io/iteration/

How I troubleshoot my website when it breaks:
https://autodidacts.io/troubleshooting/

Managed Ghost Hosting

Ghost(Pro) - $25 USD/mo when billed annually - 10% off with referral link / non-referral link

This is the official hosting by the people who make Ghost. It has been around since the beginning, and is likely to stay around the longest. The profits from Ghost(Pro) are what funds the Ghost Foundation. The servers are in the EU, the legal entity is in Singapore, and the team is remote (the two co-founders are UK-based). The downside is that it isn’t the cheapest option.

MagicPages - ~$10 USD/mo with the non-profit discount, billed annually - sign up with my referral link / sign up without referral

Based in Austria. More affordable, but still competent-seeming, and donates part of the profit to the Ghost Foundation. The downside is that this is a one-person company. The upside is that Jannis seems like a competent and trustworthy person who has been active in the community for a long time, and is likely to stick around for a while.

Gloat - ~$16 USD/mo billed annually - non-referral link

This is another one-person company. The developer is UK-based and active in the community. They offer EU datacentre locations. Like FirePress and Ghost(Pro), even though you can choose a non-US datacentre, they use Digital Ocean cloud hosting, which is a US company. (MagicPages and PikaPods host with Hetzner Online GmbH, a German cloud provider with EU datacentres.) This seems like a relatively solid option, but I don’t see anything about it that is better than MagicPages for most use cases (they do set up Stripe payments infrastructure for you), and I haven’t researched it as much.

PikaPods ~$2-5 USD/mo - non-referral link

This is a more general-purpose app hosting platform that offers managed Ghost hosting, but isn’t exclusively a Ghost hosting provider. It’s the most affordable managed Ghost hosting I am aware of. People who use it seem relatively happy with it. On the smaller plans ($2/USD mo), site speed might not be quite on par with the more expensive options, but I don’t expect it to be a big concern, and you could always scale up resources as needed. The company is based in Malta, and you can choose to host your data in an EU datacentre.

The downside: PikaPods doesn’t come with newsletter sending configured. If you were planning to fully integrate your newsletter the way Ghost makes possible, PikaPods wouldn’t be a good choice. It would be possible, but you would have to sign up for Mailgun separately, and go through the account approval and verification process, which is quite involved and tedious; and once it was set up your would be fully responsible for your email sending reputation, which can be hurt by things like spam attacks. (I deal with my own email infrastructure using Mailgun and Postmark, and am the one who defends my site against spam and cyberattacks. This stuff is a pain even for someone technical. Though I would seriously consider using it for my own projects, I can’t really recommend PikaPods, unless cost is a significant consideration, and migrating your email newsletter is not a priority.)

Note: re referral / non referral links. These don’t affect what you pay, or what you get. You can use either. For the hosting companies that I like and recommend, I have signed up to get a special URL that tells them I’m the one who spread the word about their service, and they give me a bonus if the customer is happy during the trial period and stays. It’s nice for me if you sign up with the referral links, but I want to be clear that this doesn’t effect you, and does help me. I try to avoid letting who I know or have referral programs with bias my recommendations — and I know most of the people in the Ghost ecosystem to some degree, so this is hard! — which is why I include both referral and non referral links, and leave the final choice to you.