Welcome to Bloganuary! I am participating in a writing challenge hosted by Wordpress. Each day in January, I will publish a new article based on a prompt provided by the team at Wordpress. You can join the challenge here.
I have been interested in self hosting my applications on the internet and I wanted to walk through my current setup for this website.
Jekyll
This site is running on Jekyll & is hosted by GitHub
Listmonk
I recently switched from Revue to listmonk. I really loved revues integration with Twitter where people would subscribe to my newsletter form my profile. I think it was a great feature especially for audiences who resonate with your content but sadly it is shutting down. The other alternatives don’t really seem a fit for me. I recently discovered listmonk and tried it out and so far I’m loving it although everyone discourages doing this but I believe I can managed to take care of all these plus it keeps me more committed to my website and work
Analytics
I run analytics using umami software I also created an iOS widget to help me keep track of my analytics from my Home Screen.
I love how simple umami is, I used google analytics a few times but there was just too much going on and it was easy to get lost in it all. I recently discovered Ackee analytics too which seems like a good alternative to umami
Conclusion
Personally I’m feeding a lot of my curiosity doing all this but I love the freedom it gives me to manage a lot of things
Cost
I have tried to breakdown the cost of all these services
- Jekyll
- Listmonk
- Umami
- Namecheap
I’m an engineer who’s always curious to learn and try out a couple of tools that’s why I can afford to experiment and place bets on these open source tools. I would not encourage the same if you have a different path
Today’s bloganuary prompt was uninspiring so I decided to write about something different. Thanks for reading.