Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own “sections” (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be fancy, and I apologize for not knowing how to describe this well. I’ve just been searching and searching and I don’t know what to look up to find what I want, it’s extremely frustrating. Any help is greatly appreciated.
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Just find a static host for free instead of dealing with it yourself. Million out there.
This is good advice. Learn about markdown syntax, try Obsidian to write notes that can be interrelated in a network, add drawings, and export selected notes to HTML. You can further stylize all of them with some custom CSS. There are many “content management system” (CMS) like Obsidian does. I’d self host ghostwriter. But just search for a CMS on awesome self hosted list and find something popular that’s akin to you for whatever features or underlying tech (e.g. Wagtail for django web devs)
I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I’ll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.
If I understand correctly, you want a self hosted version of Wattpad or Inkitt for posting stories. I don’t know if there is a 1:1 software that can do exactly that.
As a starting point, you could try building a static website. They easiest ones follow a blog format and store the text on a markdown file. Many have recommended Hugo on this thread, but I’d like to recommend Zola instead. Paired with the well documented tabi theme, you could spawn a new “blog” for each story and use the archive view to have the chapter selection.
It’s not exactly the best solution, but I think it’s a good starting point to try it out.
P.S. Zola is inspired in Hugo. The creator thought Hugo was too complicated.
If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I’d just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.
In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.
Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.
Grav.
I am currently using this to do exactly what you are doing. I moved from Ghost cause of many reasons. Can share links in PM if you want.
I’m sorry. I thought I had replied to this. Yes. That Grav.
I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.
Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).
If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.
Thank you for the advice. Honestly, I’m a young 20 something that just wants to output creative stuff for people to read and enjoy. None of this really popped in my head, so thanks.
I still want to host my own site for it though, but I will consider the self publishing angle as well. Thanks for the advice.
Heads up on the copyright thing. Copyright is different nation to nation. @[email protected] seems to be out of the UK or EU. Not sure what the copyright situation is like there but here in the US, anything you write is already protected under US copyright laws from the moment it’s published (such as when I hit “post” here), subject to any applicable agreements you’ve entered into, of course.
You don’t HAVE to register your work for it to be under copyright protection, but to doing so would give you a stronger case if you ever decided to go to court over copyright. To register a work in the US you would do so through the Copyright Office.
In general though, @[email protected] is right though, you should assume anything you put out in the wild will be used in a manner you never intended, and that you may not like.
For examples of how helpful copyright protection is in a practical sense, might want to check out c/piracy.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
