The new Haidra homepage

A while ago, when we set up the Haidra organization, we also developed a pretty basic website with the help of the Artbot developer (rockbandit) hosted at haidra.net. However this website remained pretty bare-bones as it not easy to maintain and the rockbandit remained busy with Artbot itself.

I also always wanted to move the devlogs I was writing about the AI Horde on the Division by Zer0, which is my personal blog, to the haidra.net website and that was not possible with the previous setup. So with the progression of Haidra to a non-profit status, it was high time that we get something nicer looking, which could also be used by the non-technical people in our team.

Initially I was planning to deploy it as a new WordPress installation, as I'm familiar with the software from dbzer0.com, but as it happens, there's a bit of a brouhaha around WordPress and their management at the moment, and I was already a bit disappointed by losing things like page analytics on WordPress just because we have a patreon account, which made me actually consider looking around other FOSS software of the same type.

I've been hearing about Ghost in the past few months from various bloggers that moved to it from Substack, and while it's newer, it seems very mature, quite fast and looks flexible enough in customization to be able to serve as the new homepage.

I decided to self-host it, for the ultimate amount of customization and control and after a few false starts due to me not being very familiar with its the tech stack, and afterwards a bit more time spent on customization. What I find particularly exciting is that it comes with a RESTful API, which might allow us to build some interesting automation to keep the frontpage a bit more...surprising.

An added benefit of ghost is that you can now subscribe directly to the devlog via email which provides another way to be informed when there's some news about the Haidra projects.

Hope you all enjoy and let us know in our comms what you think of it!