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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • It’s not downloadable software, but you might check out WordPress if you haven’t recently, it’s open source and free (though you do need to host it somewhere).

    It used to have kind of a bad reputation for being a horrible hodgepodge of bad editing UI and random plugins that do things in wildly different ways, but the WordPress team has really stepped up their game in the last few years and it’s actually very nice now as long as you stay away from the commercial plugins. There’s almost always an open source plugin available for anything you’d want to do, but the out of box experience is plenty good for most pages you’d be likely to need.

    WordPress has a very nice “block editor” enabled by default these days, which is essentially just their name for a WYSIWYG interface. Use drag and drop to design the pages, and then click a button to see it in a “code editor” that shows the HTML if you’d rather edit that way.

    Anyhow, I know it’s not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I’d mention it since you did say you are open to something web based.






  • My worker cooperative helps authors self-publish, and we use as much open-source as possible to do that. We rely almost exclusively on a number of tools which are all better than proprietary counterparts for one reason or another (sometimes merely because they are free and allow us to keep costs minimal) but the main reason is most of our clients value unquestioned data ownership over anything else. We avoid corporate cloud services and self-host as much as possible, for example.

    Having said that, IMO many of these are also better designed and better UI than comparable paid tools. Blender being the obvious best example, but WordPress is another one. I used to ignorantly shit on WP so much when I was working in the professional startup industry as a web developer. Since then, I’ve learned to my delight that it’s awesome if you don’t bog it down with a bunch of horrible plugins, and the latest versions with their block editor approach are so good for easy and quick theming.

    Here’s a list off the top of my head of our regularly used software. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and many of these are going to be unsurprising:

    • Linux (seems obvious, but definitely worth mentioning. We primarily use Ubuntu and Debian based images.)
    • Blender (2D/3D graphics)
    • GIMP (raster image editing)
    • Inkscape (vector image editing)
    • calibre (creating ebooks)
    • InvoiceNinja (generating invoices, tracking hours, payments, expenses, general accounting)
    • NextCloud (storage and collaboration on files, passwords, office editing)
    • Gitlab (git repository tracking, deployment management)
    • WordPress (client websites)
    • Caddy (web server with dead-simple config and automatic https support)
    • Zulip (chat, the threading style they use is so effective for organizing discussions about client work, it’s miles beyond Slack or any other options we’ve all used in past corporate lives)