akelei is a friendly alternative to overwhelming website and blogging software.
this isn't going to look like a glossy ad, though you can do that with akelei if you want. it's just an introduction to what it can and can't do so you can decide whether it's a good fit.
zero.
akelei is completely free to use. it's distributed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which means you are free to use it for personal projects as long as you give attribution. simply, leave the text at the bottom of the page saying "powered by akelei" and you're good to go.
no, there won't be a subscription to pay in the future. it'll always be free. so you'll always get more than you paid for.
it's a different kind of website/blog builder. it lets you focus on your content instead of having to play games with layout and styles, plugins and themes, answering dozens of questions just to make something that works.
if you've used wikipedia, you've probably noticed it's simple to navigate. the problem is the software behind it. wiki software feels like it should be easy to build a site in but it involves all kinds of manual link creation and special code just to get started.
the idea behind akelei is to make hierarchical site design an automatic process and allow you to write your content in markdown without having to worry about how the pages actually link together.
how does that actually work? you just create the pages you want then you tell akelei the relationships between those pages and it creates navigation for you. you always have breadcrumbs at the top of the page to go back to a parent page and every page has links to all its children. if you imagine your site like a tree with branches, you can always go up or down the branch without ever having to create a single link.
of course, if you want to create links to pages, posts or outside content, that's easy to do, too. just use the markdown link syntax you already know and it'll work.
formatting is easy, too. either use the built-in editor to work right inside akelei's admin area or your favorite markdown tool and paste it in when you're done. it keeps a backup of every change so you can be sure you'll never lose anything even if you make a mistake but every change is instantly live on the site as soon as you click save.
akelei is not ecommerce software. it's not built to run your store. sure, you can build an ecommerce site on top of it but that's not what it's for and there are far simpler alternatives if that's what you're looking for. you'll just get pissed if you try to do it, i promise. and i've been developing ecommerce code since before that was even the name for it.
it's also not a microblogging platform. if you're looking for a self-hosted version of twitter/x, this ain't it. it's not built to compete with the fediverse. if that's what you're aiming to do, just get mastodon.
most importantly, though, it's not a hosted system. you'll need to run it on your own server. you can't sign up for a service, which means you can never get kicked off or suspended, censored or limited.
this project's code is 100% free of generative ai.
i am fundamentally opposed to the use of generative ai anywhere in our society and do not use it in any form, including in development. none of my projects contain ai-generated code. it is possible something this code depends on has been created with ai assistance but, if it has been, i am unaware of it. as ai-generated and ai-assisted coding becomes more ubiquitous, this will become more and more difficult to ensure but my code is and always will be completely free of artificial intelligence.
generative ai is a plague on humanity, stripping us of the importance of education, thought, effort and results through doing the work. i encourage you not to participate in activities that contribute to the end of our species including using generative ai.
my name is avi sato and i'm the only developer on the akelei project. i'm also a teacher who's also worked in the tech industry since the 1990s. i've been fighting with blogging and site management software for decades and i'm tired of how truly shit it all is if what you want is to create a site without spending all your time worrying about links and formatting.
i believe things should just work and be simple. it's the ideas that are supposed to be complex, not how we share them.
you can find me in various places on the web but the easiest is avisato.com where i post educational content about history and language as well as occasional blog articles. that site runs on akelei. so does this one.
this is not a project to make money. it never will because it's completely free.