Masthead

Masthead is an open-source publishing platform for blogs and small business sites. You write your content in Markdown (or straight HTML if you prefer), pick a theme, and publish. That’s the whole loop. There is no build step, no plugin ecosystem, no server you need to babysit.

Under the hood it is a single Phoenix/OTP release that serves every site from one deployment. Each site gets its own subdomain, and the site is resolved per request from the Host header. So one running application, many independent sites. If you have ever run five WordPress installs for five small sites, you know why this matters.

The problem it solves

The honest problem is the middle ground. Static site generators are great for developers, and WordPress is great for everyone else, but both come with a tail of work that has nothing to do with writing.

With a static generator, publishing means opening a terminal. With WordPress, owning a site means updating plugins. In both cases the actual writing is the smallest part of the workflow, while it should be the focus.

Masthead rips away the extra tools and stays opinionated, which makes it fast and focused.

What Masthead is not

Masthead is not a website creation tool. You won’t find a drag-and-drop editor, you won’t have extensive support for e-commerce. There is no community-driven marketplace for extra functionality. Masthead is very good in creating static or minimal websites that are fast, and focusses on writing in markdown or HTML. This is not to see that you can’t extend your site, as you are in full control of everything if you wanted, but it was not made with complex scripting in mind.

Should you use it

Masthead is not made for everyone, an opinionated tool never is. We are also not interested in making it fit every usecase imaginable.

You should use it if you:

1. Enjoy writing in Markdown or HTML more than in a WYSIWIG editor
2. Don’t enjoy the hosting process and setting up the version control and pipelines or manual deployment necessary for Hugo
3. Want something that is way faster than wordpress or similar
4. Are interested in extensive theming options to turn it into something personal

What is this blog?

The blog itself will go into technical deep dives about how Masthead was created, what interesting engineering challenges were faced, and what the position in the market is. It won’t be “Why should you use Masthead” marketing.

It is however free to try, you can just login with your github so you don’t need to create any accounts, and can be self hosted if you prefer.

Try Masthead