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Sandstorm Blog

Host Your Web Site

By Kenton Varda - 04 Jun 2014

Sandstorm now supports apps that publish content to your personal web domain, such as blogging apps and content management systems.

While we already had an app that claimed to do this (the “Hacker CMS” app), it previously required manual configuration of nginx to actually serve the content. Users of alpha.sandstorm.io actually had to ask me to manually set things up. But as of build 0.20, you can host your site in a completely self-service way.

To try it out, install the latest version of Hacker CMS from the app list and click the “Setup DNS” button. (If you already have the app installed, install it again to get the latest version; we’re still working on automatic updates.)

Hacker CMS is still mostly a tech demo, and we’d like to replace it with ports of some better-known blogging platforms. That said, our own blog at blog.sandstorm.io is actually hosted using Hacker CMS.

Want to write your own app that does web publishing? Check out the wiki page to see how.

Tool Improvements

We’ve been hard at work improving Sandstorm’s developer experience. Some highlights include:

All Invites Sent

Everyone who was on the mailing list as of yesterday should have received an invite to alpha.sandstorm.io by now. Please let me know if you are on the list but didn’t receive one. Sorry it took so long! We will continue sending invites to new sign-ups as long as we can handle the server load.

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