Since 2013 I have had a simple page (Wordpress template) with several galleries of my photos, a bio, etc hosted by Bluehost. Since 2019, the page has been down and I don’t know why. I have not had the bandwidth to deal with it due to certain life events, travel, deaths in the family, in the intervening years. Also, my email has increasingly been ID’ed as spam and/or rejected by recipients.
I don’t even have access to my Bluehost password, so I tried to get a new one. The email associated with the account is no longer in use. The chatbot told me to email a photo of my driver license to request a new password. I did this a week and a half ago, from two different email accounts and have heard nothing.
I finally have the time/energy to look into these issues and try go get everything back online. I am not very knowledgeable about this stuff, so I have asked a friend who is retired from graphic design/printing. He is extremely knowledgeable about this and all things tech related.
My friend told me that Bluehost is crap, that I should ditch them and consider just doing a simple, free page through Publii and GitHub–and use Gandi (my registrar) for email. It seems that this would simplify things related to security, SEO, and the like. I am not doing e-commerce or hosting any huge files, so I think this should work.
What are your thoughts about this? Is this a good solution for a photographer’s or artist’s page? Are you satisfied with the results in Publii and the hosting from Github? Do you have any other suggestions for this? Do you have any links for tutorial videos or webpages?
First, register your own domain. It is reasonably cheap, and then you are always in control and can switch providers easily. (Sorry if you are already doing this, it was not clear).
I am not familiar with Publii, but it looks OK. With relatively few visitors, Github should be OK, if you fit within their fair use policy. You can always switch to something else if necessary.
E-mail is an orthogonal problem, you can use your custom domain with your provider of choice. I personally like fastmail.com, they have proven to be extremely reliable in the past decades.
I don’t know about Publii, but if you decide to stay with a traditional hosting company, I can recommend ICDSoft. I’ve been with them since 2006. They offer Wordpress, but you can set up other software as well, if that’s what you want (but then you have to manage those yourself). Support is first class.
Thanks! I have registered two domains through Gandi. This was the first thing I did in 2013 even before I signed up for Bluehost. I have always been very happy with GANDI. My friend told me that he can see why my email is getting bounced:
Bluehost: It’s a spammer’s paradise. This is one of the things that a lot of
spammers will do in addition to setting up malware hosting on
Bluehost’s
servers, they’ll use Bluehosts included mail daemon on the account
to
spam out thousands of messages a day. This gets shared hosting IP
addresses and IP address blocks blacklisted with organizations like
Spamhaus, who keep email IP address blacklists that’re used by
thousands
of other mail servers and spam filters. It appears the IP address in
your MX records is on 91 known blacklists due to…
Any tool you can use to get what you want is good. Publii seems to be a GUI for static sites, and we at pixls love static sites. The nice thing with static sites is that you’re never really in that deep and changing shouldn’t be too hard if publii doesn’t work for you.
I have used Publii for the last two years for our (private) family blog, and I like it very much! Authoring is quick and easy, image galleries are handled well, and the CSS themes are easy to edit if needed. I even migrated it several times from/to different computers (including Linux/Windows) without any trouble. Plugging in an external commenting system is easy to do, too.
But do note that it’s a local app, and does not trivially sync between multiple computers (the docs say it does work fairly well over Dropbox, though).
I also used to host a bunch of websites on Github, and never had any problem with it. My websites however are heavy on images, and soon outgrew their storage allowance, and I moved them to a dedicated host. Uberspace, in my case, but any other host would probably work just as well.
Also… be advised that migrating your site off WordPress can be a major PITA. Exporters and importers exist, but they assume you’re using the stock galleries (which I/WordPress.com didn’t), and my WordPress had silently converted all my nice high-resolution JPEGs into tiny, compressed WEBPs. Much of that was probably wordpress.com’s (the "official WordPress host) predatory business practice, and not directly wordpress.org’s (the software project) fault. Suffice it to say that my migration took a good 20h of manual work, and I still carry scar tissue from that ordeal.
hmmmm. Thanks for the replies. I just don’t know about Publii. I am very confused at the moment–Themes? I have to buy one? Well, I’m not really sure which one I want. I don’t mind paying ONCE, but “premium support” for three months? I need “support” for my theme? I really dislike anything I’m on the hook to pay for for the rest of my life. Everything is a subscription now, and it all really piles up. This is why I trashed Adobe LR, PS, Creative Cloud and the like. It seems that with WordPress, all of this is free and you can change themes any time you like and not pay anything.
I routinely learn how to use new software for my work and hobbies. I will tell you that, despite all the complaints that Raw Therapee is a beast to learn, I actually find it a lot less daunting than Publii. (Partly thanks to Andy Astbury’s excellent tutorials). I am pretty good at getting up to speed with new software without even reading much of the manual. With Publii, I have a blank screen with a very, very minimal text editor (Can’t I even pick a different font?) and a bunch of themes and plugins to buy. I feel like such an ignoramus at this point.
Is it possible to use WordPress with GitHub? Any other ideas or guidance on Publii would be appreciated. Thanks.
You don’t need to buy anything with Publii. It comes with a bunch of good, free themes, and you can make your own as well. There’s a helpful community forum as well, for support.
But you can pay for “premium” themes if you want to, and pay for personal support as well. I never saw a need to do so. That’s their -optional- monetization angle.
Fonts are managed through the themes, and you’ll need to edit their CSS to use custom fonts. It’s relatively easy to do if you have a basic understanding of web technologies.
If you are skeptical about Publii, note that there are gazillion of static website generator frameworks. I personally like Hugo, which is blazing fast (written in Go), and it has a some gallery extensions.
This is a very relevant point, but once migrated into a static website generator, it will be easier to pick a different one. Usually they have a very clear file-based structure and you can convert things with a shell script or a program.
Thanks again for the comments. I was a bit confused by reading the manual, which said:
Publii comes with one theme preinstalled for you and set the standard Simple theme by default.
Below you will find more information on how to view, download and install the various Publii themes available via the Marketplace.
Nevertheless, I guess I should have spent a bit more time on the Marketplace to discover that there are a number of free themes, which actually look really good!
I am planning on moving beyond my old WordPress page, and just make a new page with Publii from scratch. Based on what I’ve heard, this sounds a lot easier and, I think it will be a better learning experience, rather than trying to re-create the old page.
I will post the results here when it is ready so you all can roast it!
GitHub Pages is a good choice, but it requires a sound understanding of HTML and CSS to get the most out of it (though you can still get by with little more than markdown thanks to Jekyll, which comes built in). For a geekhead like myself, it’s pretty much perfect¹ — when it comes to websites, I’m all about minimalistic design; I prefer to keep all the focus on the content.
¹ Having said this, please note the following disclaimer: of all of the web tasks commanded by the internet gods, I hate building websites the most!
To be fair, there are a lot of great options to help build websites without having to ‘code,’ but nothing beats reaching for the toolbox when you want to get things just the way you like.
I’m feeling like a complete internet/webpage ignoramus at this point. I had this down well enough several years ago with WordPress and Bluehost. I don’t want to go back there, and I do like all the advantages Publii and GitHub would offer. However, I am feeling absolutely stuck at the moment.
My friend (referenced above) told me that Publii is SO SIMPLE. It’s just SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SIMPLE. He said that people of his and my generation are used to software being complex, difficult, and needing extensive documentation, but Publii does not fall into that category at all. I read everything on the Publii website, looked at web tutorials, and I sat there last night monkeying around with the damn thing for hours and NOTHING. I am used to learning things pretty quickly (I’m doing pretty well with Raw Therapee!), but this is just about the most vexing piece of software I’ve ever seen. I guess I just need a push in the right direction. I’m guessing it is like a puzzle that seems impossible at first, but then, when you know the solution, it is SOOOOOOOO SIMPLE.
I’m thinking I need to head over to my local bookstore and buy Internet for Dummies and Webpages for Dummies (2023 editions)! Or something along those lines. Can anyone suggest books, videos for a completely frustrated ignoramus, who needs to go back to square one?
