Hey! I've got a new website!

Best part is, it was pretty easy for me to set up and operate and shouldn't cost much to keep going.

I've been a fan of Ghost, probably since it first started, but never got to the point of paying for their hosting or getting any farther then having a temporary self hosted instance going.

But recently I thought of an easier way to get a Ghost site out:

  • For writing: Why not run ghost locally on my own computer?
  • For publishing: Why not generate a static site from said local ghost using some site crawler?
  • For hosting: Why not upload that static site out to a "dumb" web server, like the one in AWS S3?

And that's what I've done!

I don't have time to go into all of the details at the moment, but maybe eventually I'll get around to a follow up post about it.

For now, here are a few links to get your started if you want to try and do something similar or learn more about it.

Ghost: Turn your audience into a business
The world’s most popular modern publishing platform for creating a new media platform. Used by Apple, SkyNews, Buffer, OpenAI, and thousands more.
Ghost - The Professional Publishing Platform
Cloud Object Storage | Store & Retrieve Data Anywhere | Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
cornelk/goscrape
Web scraper that can create an offline readable version of a website - cornelk/goscrape
cornelkGitHub
How to add HTTPS for an S3 bucket website with Cloudflare
AWS S3 provides a simple way to store files in a highly available object storage and it also supports setting up static websites. If you don’t need dynamiccontent then using an S3 bucket is an attractive hosting option. You pay practically nothing for storage and you can forget about scalability.
Tamás SallaiAdvanced Web Machinery

Also, I saw another potential way to generate a static site from Ghost using eleventy, but have yet to look more closely:

TryGhost/eleventy-starter-ghost
A starter template to build websites with Ghost & Eleventy - TryGhost/eleventy-starter-ghost
TryGhostGitHub