Self-hosted blogging tools with UI/interface?

[bennizone]

  Hi friends!!!
I've been dreaming about the perfect blogging tool (for me!) ... Something similar to statuscafe, which gives you a widget for easy posting/no html-editing, but allowing infinite writing space and image-attachment. And, I'd like to host the text+images myself, so that it's all happening on my end. Each blog-post should have its own page, or the option of opening in a new page so I can link to specific posts when needed. Only knowledge of HTML, CSS and some Javascript copy-pasting/tweaking required.
THAT'S THE DREAM... is this possible at all, do you think? does it exist yet?    thanks in advance!

[MediocreMetastasis]

It does. I made one myself but my method required php and sql.

My solution is not very fancy tho. For one this is my UI

Also, I just use html for my blog content, but you can program it to use bbcode.


For static sites (like neocities) it'll be way more complicated. You can always create a tool that generates a html page for you (office word can generate html pages of your word doc for example).

[Loebas]

Honestly i would go for Flatpress

Its blogging software that only requires a webserver with PHP. No database needed. Unlike wordpress it is very lightweight and easy on any webserver.

It stores your blogposts, assets, etc. in files in a single directory.

Sadly it does not work on Neocities at the moment. But imho kyle should consider adding PHP support for their supporters.
But for neocities you always have zonelets, but this requires you to edit a javascript file everytime you add a blogpost.

[ribose]

what you're describing is often called a content management system, or CMS. if you're searching the web for more options, "CMS" is a useful term to include in your searches!

both options above would require you to move to a different host, but if you want to keep your site on neocities, maybe something like publii would work well for you? instead of setting up a web server that you log into, it's a program you run on your computer to generate site files that you can then upload to a static host like neocities. so i guess you could call it a static site generator, or SSG, but it's different from every other SSG i've seen because those still have you writing the all files in your code editor, where this gives you more of a word document-like post editor, which i think is what you want. another useful term to search for this kind of thing is WYSIWYG, which stands for "what you see is what you get". unfortunately with publii, all the existing themes look pretty corporate, and i have no idea how hard it is to make a new one that looks more fun. i haven't tried it myself; i just think it's interesting!

[bennizone]

[...] maybe something like publii would work well for you? [...]

VERY interesting, thank you so much !! CMS sounds like what I'm looking for, knowing what it's called now is super helpful. I will look into publii and possible customization-options, it seems promising! 

(EDIT) oh and, I'm not opposed to moving hosts sometime! Nekoweb seems cool. I haven't had the brain-capacity to look into the pros and cons of each, nor how easy/hard it would be to move my site, so I don't really have an opinion right now haha.   

[ribose]

I'm not opposed to moving hosts sometime! Nekoweb seems cool.

moving to nekoweb would be pretty simple; you just download your site as a .zip in your neocities dashboard and then import that .zip in your nekoweb dashboard. however moving to nekoweb would not let you use a traditional CMS like the ones mentioned above, because like it's still a static-only host (no PHP support). one thing they do support that neocities doesn't is server-side includes (SSI). this lets you reuse bits of HTML, so for example you could just write something like <!--# include file="header.html" --> and <!--# include file="footer.html" --> at the top and bottom of your posts to give them all the same layout. if you prefer writing markdown to HTML, their paid tier supports a SSI directive that automatically renders markdown to HTML, and another directive to generate a list based on files in a directory (useful for blog index pages and image galleries). it's not quite what you described in your first post, but maybe a bit easier than the blog workflow you have now!

re: moving or not moving hosts, another option would be leave your main site where it is and try out different hosts on a subdomain (like blog.bennizone.net). that's is what i did! i made one little site on heliohost to try PHP, and another on github pages to try a SSG for the first time. eventually i moved my main site from neocities to nearlyfreespeech (which supports both PHP and SSI), but it took me a few months of thinking about it before i was ready to make the change! there's no "right" answer here, and hopefully i haven't overloaded my responses with too many options! the best way to host and build your site is the way that is most comfortable for you

edited to fix a typo