HN Explorer

45 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 93.4 ms ] thread
sarreph
Great idea to leverage GitHub pages! Not sure if this has been done before but this is certainly a lucrative SaaS opportunity due to the non-existent marginal cost of creating a GitHub site.

-- IF OP is the author (or the author sees this) Couple of nitpicks about your landing page:

- Syntax / typo: "no server's rent" --> "no server costs to pay" or similar

- Please do your visitors a favour and add controls to your YouTube embed. It might seem 'aesthetically pleasing' to have a sleek video but it's an explanatory film that a user A) might want to full-screen (lots of small text) and B) might want to be skip around in

Would also consider changing 'About Us' to a marketing-style header pushing the product itself (as it's not really an 'About Us' anyway) as well as an explanatory line or two that explains the product properly and succinctly, as icons alone don't really suffice IMO.

Other than that, great concept — and great start!

ekzy
Agreed about the youtube video. It is a bit frustrating not to be able to move forward, especially because the typing speed is quite slow :D

A few blog examples made with hubpress on the landing page would be great too.

Anthonny
Yes the youtube video is really frustrating and i will change that.

Thank you for the suggestion about adding blog example ;)

lips
Agreed. Workaround: Click video for focus, either click again or press space to play. Use left/right arrow keys for 5s jumps, < and > to adjust speed. I use these commands about every 30 minutes.
Anthonny
Thank you, i will fix this video soon
Anthonny
Thank you so much for all your advices, i will apply them asap :)
soumyaray
Genuine question: Is there any attraction of this tool for folks who already know how to use a static site generator (SSG)? I'm guessing most people who understand how to use git could catch onto an SSG overnight.

(I should add that this is an impressive concept and I'm just begging for a reason to use it).

delluminatus
Whether or not you use an SSG, I find the biggest hurdle is getting/making a good theme for your blog. It looks like this comes theme-included, which is actually a pretty big deal if you want to get up and running fast.
WorldMaker
Yeah, Hubpress, Octopress, Jekyll Bootstrap, and at least one other I can't quite recall, are all the idea of having a preconfigured blog theme ready to go instead of having to build one from scratch (or stick with the very plain Jekyll default). They'll sometimes do things like pre-configure useful Jekyll plugins and provide additional scaffolding tools (this used to be a particularly big deal of Octopress, IIRC, for the versions of Jekyll before it added its own scaffolding system).

It's a nice to have to get started quickly when you don't want to custom build a theme or you want someone else to figure out a lot of the basic configuration.

Anthonny
Yes, HubPress is theme-included and the theme engine is the Ghost.io one.

As Ghost is MIT, my idea was to use the same engine, so it's easy to build a new theme or add an existing ghost theme in HubPress

Tobold
If understood this right (I didn't take a close look at the 3MB Javascript), this is SSG running in the browser, from the static site. So you don't have to run anything (except a browser) on your local machine (not even git).
wodenokoto
For one, you can just log in and update your blog. No need to be at that computer that has your SSG software installed.

EDIT: having tried hubpress just now, I take that back. I can't figure out how to post anything.

ben_jones
It could be a good way to teach basic github usage.
steffoz
Well, even if you do not understand Git, static website generators are starting to become a viable solution.. if you want to offer a web-based editing experience to your clients, you can use products like http://www.datocms.com/ or https://forestry.io/
sanderp
I really like the idea, it looks like an easy way to get a simple blog started. Looks great as well!

I do have one concern: I'm assuming that the repo driving the blog is public, which means that all unpublished posts are still visible on Github, right?

opmac
Correct, if they're pushed.
sarreph
You can run a GitHub Pages site/blog from a private repo.

Obviously, you need a paid GitHub subscription to do this, but it is possible (with relatively low cost).

krionicle
Are we aware of any efforts to decentralize git so that blogs made with it can't be silenced at one point of failure?
WorldMaker
Well, this is a decent start:

    $ git remote add newbloghost http://somethingnotgithub.com/example/path.to.git
    $ git push --set-upstream newbloghost gh-pages
baus
I think you are missing the point of git.
wodenokoto
I think parent meant github.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
danso
Jekyll is open source and it can be run on any server (I always use it locally) and its output is just static HTML, which means it can be served from anywhere.
Spivak
You might want to check out using CI to build your site. It's really satisfying to watch the commit -> push -> build -> deploy cycle.
Spivak
How decentralized are we talking? Because there are more shared hosting providers, VPS providers, and domain registrars than I can shake a stick at.

If you don't want to depend on GitHub, there's nothing stopping you. I host my site on a VPS and couldn't be happier.

pwenzel
HubPress looks super useful. How does it handle other non-blog-ish content Jekyll supports, like data files and collections?

I've used Prose.io as well, which has a nice UI and serves a similar purpose. I like that HubPress can just be run from your domain though.

Dzugaru
HubPress app.js can do what it pleases with my github password, am I right? And I couldn't find non-minified sources easily.

P.S. found sources at dev.hubpress.io on another branch

Anthonny
All the sources are on the repository dev.hubpress.io on the branch development.

Each commit build the minified version on the branch master and gh-pages. If you want to see how work authentication, you can also have a look to the repository hubpress-plugin-github

wodenokoto
I forked the repo, followed the setup instructions and now what?

There's a "writers guide" that claims it will help me write my first post, but it is just an overview of the AsciiDoc format, and tells you nothing about how to save new posts to your blog.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Anthonny
Hi, I'm Anthonny, the creator of HubPress, give me the url of your github account to check if all is allright. You just have to go to this url: <url_of_your_github_pages_site>/hubpress, log in and then you can start to write

Feel free to join our slack if you need support or if you just want to talk :) https://hubpressio-slack.herokuapp.com/

The_Hoff
This seems great. When I created (and failed to keep up with) a Jekyll blog on GitHub last year, I had fun learning the in's and out's of the generator on my own, but I predict this will foster even more of an appreciation for GitHub Pages by giving users a way to spend more time customizing and tweaking than building a foundation from the ground up.
abyd
Do you plan to use ssl?
leeny
Your logo looks almost identical to HackerRank's. I work in the eng recruiting space, so not everyone might think so. But still.
anonymousDan
Could I run this off a locally hosted gitlab repo too somehow?
jayjohnson
Not the same as HubPress (which looks like something I wish I knew about), but just a month ago I wanted to run an SSG locally (that wasn't using jekyll) so I built this one for deploying nginx + sphinx using docker. It auto-converts rst markup files into bootstrap + bootswatch html-themed posts (and has a search engine in it). http://jaypjohnson.com/2016-06-25-host-a-technical-blog-with...
Anthonny
I am working on a gitlab plugin, i hope to publish it soon
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Anthonny
Thank you so much type0 for this thread
marcammann
Funny enough, I've been using "write a blog based on Gists on Github for a certain user" as a take-home test for the past 3 years when hiring JS developers.

Now I have to watch out for copy cats..