PinkPigeon

One can but try, but it feels like that's getting harder and harder to do these days...

This is a brilliant tool, thank you very much for showing me. Bookmarked.

Thank you for pointing that out, fixed!

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month.

It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my money is actually doing anything)

I build it originally because I was fed up with Wordpress / Squarespace / Weebly / Wix, because all of their interfaces are slow and don't work on mobile.

This CMS is fast and works on mobile.

It's also pretty cheap nowadays, as I've not been raising prices like everyone else.

It won't do super-flashy websites. It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users (I live rurally and we have a fair few pensioners as clients, they all get along with the system very well).

There are just about a billion things I want to do with it, but it never made enough money to become my full-time job, so it mostly just sits there and does its job.

I run https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

Just about at $500 per month in recurring hosting fees.

It's a CMS which publishes static sites to Cloudflare workers sites.

I've not done any marketing, it's all word of mouth and took 3 years to get to this point.

Gonna keep growing it slowly on the side.

We have one of these locally, but it's called a community shed, to not exclude women arbitrarily. At the same time, I still think it's mostly used by men, as it's quite focused around woodworking etc.

They were one of the first businesses to use my CMS for one of their websites, so they hold a special place in my heart :)

I've recently been building a business directory using Bubble.io. It took me about half a day to do tutorials and another half day playing around just to learn the platform. After that, I was able to build this business directory, including Stripe payment integration, some reasonably advanced Google Maps and search / categorisation functionality.

Building the same thing from scratch would have taken me two weeks or so.

I am saying this as someone whose main job is providing a CMS, so I am familiar with having to create a simple enough interface for non-technical users to use my CMS.

Hats off to Bubble.io for achieving such a usable interface for being able to knock up an app this quickly.

At the same time it is clear that some actions which would be painfully simple to perform in code take a lot of clever thinking and hacks to convince bubble.io to do it.

It also won't scale and if it breaks for no reason, it'll be nearly impossible to fix it.

If it doesn't provide a certain bit of functionality, you have to add your own CSS / JS and that's where it becomes clear that my extensive knowledge in web development contributed to my ability to use this no-code tool a lot.

Ultimately, I think a no-code tool can be a great way to enable programmers to build things quickly, but I think the ability to think like a programmer is still worth learning.

I'd be surprised if these tools could replace anyone building complex applications in the near future.

I'm on the original, round dish, not the rectangular new one. I wonder whether this can be done on the round dish, as that one used even more power.

Do you happen to know anyone who managed to figure out what the electrical requirements for the cable are? We tried mounting the antenna outside and connecting the cable via an external box to the inside (using cat 6 cable), but Starlink immediately started complaining about a 'bad connection', which went away when we routed the cable to the power brick unimpeded. But it would really be much neater if we could use our own house's ethernet wiring. But evidently Starlink doesn't like it.

I love getting in after 1,000 comments, let's do this:

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

Built with my own site-builder and advertising my own site-builder!

Turns out nobody registers for a free account or just signs up. All my business comes from building websites for people and word of mouth.

I optimised the thing for speed of building websites above all else, which helps, seeing as I'm a one-person operation.

At pinkpigeon.co.uk we created a website builder that literally just pushes Hugo-generated sites to Cloudflare.

It has been working perfectly for about a year by now.

We don't use CF pages, admittedly. It's workers sites, due to the ability to publish directly.

Pages doesn't allow for direct deployments. Has to go via git repo + webhooks. We make static sites with our CMS and don't really want to integrate another thing into our workflow. Lots of CF and git API calls to automate the whole thing reliably. Thus, we're sticking with workers sites for now. Pages is an attractive offering, however.

Wix are true experts at terrible UX ;)

DeviantArt was the first place where I shared photography, a very, very long time ago. My account still works, funnily enough. It was a great place that reminds me of the MySpace / wild west days of the earlier internet.

Good memories.

Never managed to get this to work on a laptop with an Intel 520 gpu and latest Linux Mint. Deskreen isn't the problem. It's trying to create a virtual display. You'll see my comments with my findings on on every github / stackoverflow discussion regarding the matter. There are a few.

Until there is a bullet proof way of creating virtual displays, Deskreen isn't of much use to someone with my use case. Which is a damn shame. I really wanted to use an iPad as 2nd screen.

I concur, many of my clients are 'rescues' from Wix and Wordpress and the only thing more hated than Wordpress is Wix.

More often than not it comes down to the horrifyingly confusing documentation, inconsistent UX, hilarious over-promising the world + dog on landing pages, etc.

Also, exfiltrating a website from Wix (changing the nameservers, which should take two seconds, like it does with any other hoster) is a huge ordeal. They make it very difficult.

My solution to this is https://pinkpigeon.co.uk

I built it specifically to address shortfalls of other site builders:

- No themes

- Uses 'modules' rather than the strangely popular drag and drop thing with blocks and widgets (which then jumble about the page wildly when resizing). We have 40 modules at the moment and I keep building more.

- 100% mobile optimised. We hide no functionality and most page editing I tend to do side by side, with the CMS in a separate window next to the preview site

- The preview site updates automatically when you hit 'save' so that it can be viewed on many devices in real-time at the same time (and shared easily too)

- It's very fast. No React or other shenanigans. There is JS for the more complex interactions, but it's been applied sparingly. Doesn't work without JS though.

- Sites are deployed to Cloudflare Workers Sites. The SSG behind the scenes is Hugo

I don't advertise this thing anywhere and all my clients are word of mouth. I have yet to hear a single negative thing from anyone.

I live in the countryside so my clients are all pensioners who don't know computers. They've all had run-ins with WordPress and naturally hated it. (though I don't want to knock a properly setup WordPress, IMO you have to be technical to do it and my system is aimed specifically at non technical people)

I don't do shops and even blogs are probably not directly my target audience. But if you just need to make a simple site with pictures, videos and images (maybe a mailchimp signup, instagram gallery or Google calendar signup or showing some PDF newsletters), then I'd challenge you to do it faster in any other system.

I'm doing this on the side, so have no time to build websites, so it takes no time to build websites in my system :) (I've built a lot of websites for free and just end up collecting the hosting charge which is between £8-£13 a month, which is hopefully similar to some sitebuilders, but I can't compete with the £3 per month offerings that tie you into other services and immediately become more expensive as soon as you add any meaningful functionality.)

There are about a billion things I want to improve about it of course. It's certainly not perfect, but finding the time is a challenge. I hope to one day be able to make it my full time job.

Tried signing up, but (presumably) your configuration is pointing the signup link in the email at your local Dev environment...

I tried replacing localhost with wax.run, but it didn't do anything.

Lastly, considering you are all about marketing and growth, you'll need a landing page that demonstrates this. As in, your landing page needs to be better than most landing pages. While I'm all about minimalism, I found it quite jarring to just land on a page with a half moon on it, which doesn't really do anything.

Some words about who you are would go a long way. There is a "team" link in the navigation and that also doesn't go anywhere (without a login presumably)

Just some pointers. Pm me when we can sign up, because if you are the people who solve marketing for me, that would easily be the biggest revolution in my entrepreneurial journey. I hate marketing so much.

Not your keys, not your crypto. It is best practice to keep the smallest amount of crypto possible on an exchange. Every exchange has the biggest target imaginable painted on their back, for all hackers worldwide. I'd keep my crypto there just as happily as in a wild west bank surrounded by bandits...

Do you mean easiest CMS to install and get up and running on a VPS or do you mean easiest CMS to use / fastest way to get a website up and running? If the latter, try https://pinkpigeon.co.uk (disclaimer, that's my project). I'd like to think we're up there in terms of ease of use.

Yeah POST requests with any sort of advanced functionality will always require some kind of server.

I built a thing that makes static sites, including form handling. BUT, the form handling, inevitably, requires a POST request back to a form-forwarding server that then sends you the enquiry via email (https://pinkpigeon.co.uk). Netlify include form handling for static sites, but it's so pricey that that was one of the main motivators for me to build my own solution.

I am not sure what the best implementation for this would be. Some people may go down the AWS Lambda route or something similar, but that's still just a (albeit highly distributed) server forwarding the request for you.

So far as I can tell, Wordpress requires PHP and a DB still, you're just storing a static snapshot of the WP site on Cloudflare pages here. I think.

https://kivy.org/#home is the closest I ever got to working with UI in Python and not hating it. But it still appears to be an unsolved problem.

Thanks for the explanation, much appreciated!

For our website builder (https://pinkpigeon.co.uk) we once chose an ORM (GORM for Go specifically).

In case you don't know what this does, it's an abstraction layer for working with databases like MySQL, PostgresQL, etc.

Everyone warns against using them, but in the very early days of my learning Go, there was a tutorial that included this, so I just went with it.

ORMs give you some advantages: Switching database drivers (aka, switching databases) is pretty easy. If it's supported by your ORM, you can then just switch to a different DB entirely. For the simplest of operations, like just writing stuff to your DB and then retrieving it again, they work a charm. Especially in Go, the ability to automatically marshal things into structs is a blessing.

BUT, then you try to start doing things with many2many relationships, or retrieving sorted data in a very specific, nested query and things go sideways quickly.

I ended up finding it much harder to try to figure out how to do some pretty obvious things. Endless hours on Stackoverflow fighting the ORM and its shockingly bad documentation...

Eventually I just bit the bullet and learned how to write Postgres queries, along with a small Go library called sqlx (https://jmoiron.github.io/sqlx/) which massively outperformed GORM (https://medium.com/@rocketlaunchr.cloud/how-to-benchmark-dbq...) and it's much more straight forward to reason about the relationship between my application layer and the DB.

Small nitpick, I just read half the page with a 50% opacity overlay on it, as the cookie pop-up shows up in the middle of the page, not the middle of my current screen, which can be caused by setting an absolute width against a relative parent, or setting position to fixed but then using percentages instead of vw / vh attributes in CSS...

As someone knee deep in the 'serverless' world, I am also interested in what exactly this does that couldn't be solved by any number of key / value stores, like Cloudflare offer.

Call me a cynic, but it feels like we are slightly going round in circles, like "we have found that adding a database to our database-less services is a great idea" (even if that database is in the cloud and distributed and therefore low management and high reliability)

But maybe I am just missing the point here. Still seems like an interesting product and I don't want to come off as dismissive or discouraging.

I get a lot of mileage out of BrowserStack. When it comes to QA, I probably spend more time in there than in my actual local browsers. I like it a lot.

With that said, I'm on Linux, so here's what I would _pay_ to see in the future:

- More solid local testing support. It's been a very inconsistent experience (no doubt due to the fact that the Chrome extension isn't a thing anymore. Presumably changes in the browser API made it impossible to keep doing things a certain way). I can still make it work, but it feels hacky.

- Your video compression is aggressive. I'd probably even pay more just to get a bit less lag / artifacting. It's actually bad enough to make testing of timings / animations and visually dense content nearly impossible.

- Connections drop regularly on a variety of devices, but not others

- First-class Firefox support

The funny thing is that bubble.io (as one example) does this already. And it does it really well.

And now I look on freelancer.com and there's still people wanting to hire "bubble developers".

I have been talking to my tech illiterate friends what they think about "easy" no-code solutions like WordPress or squarespace.

The answer is always the same. It's all far too complicated and confusing.

If I presented someone like that with bubble.io and said "here is this node graph tool to connect..." I'd have lost them at node graph and they would never, ever learn, let alone like that thing.

Apple famously drive engineers crazy with their UI philosophy of hiding everything at the cost of control or customisation. But I have a feeling it works.

I feel that for many people, tech is this confusing thing that will never not be confusing because they've learned to expect that. At least my friends in their late 20s to 30s have fought with technology all their lives to the point where I don't know if anything can remedy that preset expectation.

So long as these people exist, we as engineers and developers can keep looking at these no-code tools and marvel at how simple things have been made, but I think we have to change our expectations and realise that even the simplest still has to become simpler.

The battle of trying to teach that generation technical concepts is a very hard one, when there are companies falling over each other trying to simplify everything to the point of almost, well, zero-effort? Maybe that's the next step: low-code, then no-code (but some effort involved) and then no-code, no-effort (aka you just sit there passively while a computer reads your brain and works out everything you want)

I say all of this while I'm building a no-code website builder that's looking more and more like it'll be targeting kids, the elderly and luddites, so I've had to do some thinking around this problem space recently.

I happen to build one of them. Have a look at https://pinkpigeon.co.uk and I'll check back in here to answer any questions.

It's worth noting that your point is correct: a no code solution for building websites is inevitably going to be limited in terms of how much customisation someone can do, but one gains speed and ease of use on the flipside.

Random nitpick, but I think it's à la. Do correct me if I'm wrong though.

Interesting article.

Having been a Heroku user who then switched to my own Dokku-VPS, I have a few thoughts:

- Back then you HAD to use postgres. Didn't bother me, but might bother others. - Things get expensive quick. I recently beefed up my VPS which is now as expensive as Heroku's cheapest paid tier, but what I get for it is miles beyond Heroku.

Of course I now have to deal with upgrading and looking after my VPS, without any kind of support. Though, whether I end up learning how to use Dokku or Heroku made no difference to me, really. Some people will say that even that amount of management is unacceptably involved, which, for a SaaS that's got really good growth right off the bat, is probably true? You'd want to really maximise productivity and not worry about infra.

Last point: the article mentions that Heroku is well placed to compete with Netlify, Vercel and the like. Why would they though? I feel their offering is way beyond static pages? And considering how cheap the competition is, you'd then need to create a new / separate pricing tier that operates according to completely different rules from the others. I am not sure that would work.

I feel Vercel and Netlify are in more trouble thanks to Cloudflare Pages and Workers Sites. They offer next to no advantages and are really ridiculously expensive in comparison.

The article also refers to something as the Jamstack-lie. Is that just because 'serverless' is a ridiculous misnomer or the fact that Netlify are marketing the term Jamstack so hard, even though everyone could just say 'static pages'? Or does the article's author think we are going back to databases for all our sites à la WordPress?