Open Sourcing ShedTheShade -a Ghost(Pro) Alternative
How it's still better than self-hosting
So, In the last blog post I wrote about how I decided to build shedtheshade.com when I got on Ghost(Pro). The journey over last month has been exciting, including promoting STS(short for ShedTheShade) across various social media, platforms and indie hacker forums including ProductHunt. I was able to gather few inital clients excluding me of course (ps. I am still using it for hosting blogs for various projects including DoShare - File Sharing Service, convertr - Media nad File Conversion Service , api2.news - News API as a Service, Seed Stage - Brand New NewsLetter and Community for StartUp Founders and of course shedtheshade - The Blog Hosting Platform)
How Ghost(Pro) still wins
Over this period since launch, I visited Ghost Community Forum and r/Ghost Reddit Community and saw that there are many features except Managed Hosting, SSL for Custom Domain, Global CDN that Ghost(Pro) provides including Managed Mail Setup, which is an interesting feature as self hosted version only supports MailGun even though they don't have any affiliations with Ghost.org.
I saw many users both technical and non-technical encountering problems while setting up their Self-Hosted Instances when using Digital Ocean Droplets or migrating to PikaPods.
Some with analytics and some with configuring Stripe (myself included, since Stripe has withdrawn operations in India), and a common problem with MailGun not providing a free tier and hence users have to integrate their messaging services via Zapier.
I also cold emailed various theme developers providing them with 12 month free hosting on no terms, renewable on mutual basis, but haven't recieved any response, yet.
Are you a Theme Dev? or If you want to host a demo site for your theme contact-us via this form. We will get back to you within 12-24 Hours.
Contributions and Discussions
At ShedTheShade, I don't simply want to do business, I want to improve user experience such that they feel the difference around it.
So, I am hoping of developing an alternative to MailGun and Stripe with International Payments, over next few months and integrating it into the ShedTheShade Ghost Image by Default and simultaneously contributing to Ghost's Official Repository. Also, not that I don't like Google Analytics, but I am thinking of integrating Privacy Friendly - Plausible Analytics into Ghost Admin too.
Over the next few months various other features including IAM based access and SSO, and other AI based writing support tools will also be released.
If you are willing to invest in this venture, send a mail at [email protected]
Building a community around it
Over the period of next 6 months I am hoping that we have a developer community of startup or indie venture founders and their social media teams. Suggesting and utilizing every tool and feature provided by ShedTheShade to make the user flow easier to operate and manage.
Hence, I have open sourced the code for ShedTheShade WebUI Interface below
This is the end of one journey and start of another. Let's make it awesome.🎄