offsky

I am rebuilding the website for my hobby club (currently wordpress). I would like to add some new features for members, but I also want be mindful about future maintainers who may not be technical.

The top 2 criteria are: 1) It has to be super simple for certain elderly non technical members to add items to an events calendar and upload a PDF of the monthly newsletter for members to download. The wordpress UI is too much to handle for them as it is. Something similar like Wix or SquareSpace would also be too much I think. I want to build a custom form that is dead simple.

2) If I leave the club in the future I want the next maintainer to have an easy job, so I dont want to use any cutting edge tech or proprietary cloud services or anything high maintenance.

My initial idea is a mostly static html site with some vanilla JS that reads a json file to generate the dynamic calendar and newsletters pages. Then I would make a custom form (php perhaps) behind a "Basic Auth" password that would update said json file. This would avoid a database. Something like this could be hosted almost anywhere and future maintainers would only need to know js/php which are very similar in syntax, and also popular and dont require a gajillion dependencies.

What other suggestions do people have for a tech stack that is super dumb and requires minimal knowledge to maintain.

I was just about to invest considerable time and effort into learning Flutter and building a cross platform app. I’m well aware of Google’s propensity to cancel products, but the Google Domains news was still surprising to me because it seemed central to their GCP business. Now. I’m not so sure that Flutter won’t be canned next year. I mean, Google isn’t making mega money directly from Flutter, so it can’t be safe. Opinions?

I am preparing to launch a side project in the saas space. As with all saas projects, I will be storing customer data and I want to protect myself from data loss or data leaks either through my own stupidity or through malicious actors. I already have an LLC to protect my personal assets and I already have language in my T&C to do what it can. However, I also need insurance and that is what my question is about.

Has anyone had any good experiences with affordable saas/tech startup insurance companies?

I am planning to translate a static website into a few other languages. I am trying to figure out the best structure for doing this. I can think of 5 ways to do it. Example using Spanish:

1) es.example.com/index.html

2) www.example.es/index.html

3) www.example.com/es/index.html

4) www.example.com/index.html (with language set via a cookie)

5) www.example.com/index.html?lang=es

I see a problem with #2 already because TLDs are country specific not language specific. Also expensive.

I think #4 has a problem with regard to search engine optimizations as both languages would have the same canonical url. I would like my content to be indexed in both languages.

Wikipedia does #1. Apple does #3. Google does both #2 and #4.

Question 1) What structure would people here recommend?

Question 2) Would it be best to detect the browser's preferred language and auto-redirect people, or should I make the user do that language choice manually?

Personally, I postponed upgrading my Mac to Catalina for longer than I should have because it meant giving up YummyFTP (32-bit only), which had powerful synchronization capabilities that I have not found elsewhere. I miss it.

I also oddly miss Norton Speed Disk. I got a certain OCD satisfaction from knowing that all the bytes on my hard drive were organized.

I was wondering what software other people miss being able to run.

This question has been asked here before, but not for several years, so I was wondering if any recommendations have changed. I am looking for a reliable managed VPS host where I can throw some of my hobby sites and not have to worry about them. I need a basic LAMP server with SSH, automatic SSL and unlimited websites and mysql databases. Managed, because I just want to upload and forget about maintenance.

In the past I have used:

• LiquidWeb CloudSites - Good, but they don't support automatic SSL renewal, so it became a hassle.

• A2Hosting - Good, but there are some firewall quirks that have gotten me a few times and support hasn't be great.

• Digital Ocean Apps - Experimented with this. Was expensive and some limitations like ephemeral filesystem.

• Cloudways - Been pretty happy with this one. The control panel is a little clunky and you only get 1 DB per website, but its been pretty good for me. Support is hit or miss.

• Rackspace - Good but expensive.

I can't trust any of the "10 Best Managed VPS..." articles that I find on Google because they are just affiliate link spam, so Im coming here looking for suggestions :)