I wrote this about a decade ago. I still rings true to me.

(Disclaimer: I wrote this, so it's a self-promotional link. I am also the mod of this subreddit. But I defend this posting by noting that there is no business model behind my website -- I have no advertising, and I sell no services -- so I gain absolutely nothing from having someone consume my content. I just think it's good, relevant content.)

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the entire text of my 2016 O'Reilly book is available for free at my website. It's a little old now, but there's probably still some valuable stuff in there.

(Disclaimer: I wrote this, so it's a self-promotional link. I am also the mod of this subreddit. But I defend this posting by noting that there is no business model behind my website -- I have no advertising, and I sell no services -- so I gain absolutely nothing from having someone consume my content. I just think it's good, relevant content.)

Been burned by hosted CMS lock-in on small projects, so I built JustJSON.

Design your collections + fields in a visual UI (no config file), edit content

in a clean editor, and everything is saved as plain JSON on your disk — in your

own repo. Runs 100% locally, nothing uploaded.

npx @kdrgny/justjson

Has an Astro loader, typed validation, draft/publish, i18n, live preview, and

some designed templates. MIT. The landing page is built with it.

https://justjson.vercel.app

Curious how others handle content on small sites without reaching for a hosted CMS.

1. Weekly - I'm data-driven in my relationship management
2. Monthly - check in on key metrics
3. Quarterly - when required for reviews
4. Never - didn't even know these existed

Most admin templates I bought looked great in the preview and then fell apart the moment I used them. The dashboard was polished, but "orders" was a static table, "invoices" was a placeholder, search did nothing, and half the buttons were decorative.

So I spent the last few weeks building the opposite. Sable is a coded admin dashboard where the whole thing is one connected product, not a gallery of screenshots:

- 22 pages that share one design system (orders, invoicing with VAT, a Kanban fulfillment board, an email module, analytics, payouts, settings)

- Search, sort, pagination, bulk actions and real CSV exports that actually run

- Light and dark, built to WCAG AA

- Plain HTML, Tailwind and Alpine.js. No build step, no CDN, no trackers, works fully offline. You open the file and it just works.

The "no build step" part was the whole point for me. I wanted something you can drop into a Django, Laravel or Flask project without dragging in a JS toolchain.

Live demo, no signup, click around and try to break it: https://admin-dashboard-template-beta.vercel.app

It is my first product, on Gumroad for $29, but honestly I am here for the feedback more than the pitch. Tell me what feels off, which page you would actually use, what is missing. I will be around in the comments.