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Show HN: Lists.sh – A Microblog for Lists (lists.sh)

271 points by qudat ↗ HN
Greetings, creator here!

I've been working on a new blogging platform specifically for lists on and off for a few months now and I'm excited to officially announce its launch.

After seeing https://charm.sh a few months ago, I've been enamored by the idea of SSH apps. I decided that a blogging platform focused on developers could be the perfect use case for an SSH app.

Also, I love writing lists. I think restricting writing to a set of lists can really help improve clarity in thought. The goal of this blogging platform is to make it simple to use the tools you love to write and publish lists. There is no installation, signup is as easy as SSH'ing into our CMS, and publishing content is as easy as copying files to our server.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

source: https://github.com/neurosnap/lists.sh

60 comments

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umtksa
I love anything about ssh btw there is a typo "Create lists using your favorite editor in plan text files." plain
lousyd
But... scp is deprecated, isn't it?
qudat
It seems on its way out. Originally I wanted to use rsync but felt like `scp` was a simpler command to work with and retool for my needs.
cdcarter
The SSH interface is very cool. This feels very at home in the tildeverse.

How did you approach writing an SSH backed app? Were there other apps you drew inspiration (design or technical) from? I’m intrigued by this!

qudat
My main source of inspiration was https://charm.sh

They built an incredible demo `ssh git.charm.sh` and it had my mind spinning with the possibilities.

I noticed they had an `scp` example (https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish/tree/main/scp) that I ended up repurposing for lists.sh.

I think SSH apps have a ton of potential for people that live in the terminal so I couldn’t wait to try the tech out.

funOtter
I wonder if this would be popular with people who used "The List App" or li.st (BJ Novak's startup)
qudat
I never heard of it before, I’ll do some reading. Thanks for taking a look!
tunedmystic
This is super awesome and congrats on the launch!

I've dabbled with Go in the past, but I've been wanting to build with it some more.

How was your experience building this with Go? Do you like it?

qudat
I thought golang was great to build this product with. Besides using the fantastic charm tool chain, the std library was was able take me across the finish line. The code is relatively small and digestible and building a couple self contained binaries is a fantastic DX.
tunedmystic
Awesome! Will definitely use your project as reference!
gregsadetsky
Congrats @qudat! Small note/typo: on https://lists.sh/spec , the link in the "The source code for our parser can be found here." sentence leads to a 404 page.

Cheers

qudat
Hey thanks for checking lists.sh out! I've fixed the link.
maxloh
Your repo seems to be unlicensed. If it is not intended, can you add a license file to the repo?
qudat
Hey thanks for pointing this out. I've added an MIT license to the project.
j3s
neat! i'll be playing with this more tomorrow. https://lists.sh/j3s

love the idea of using ssh-as-auth for webapps. this is a fun implementation of that idea. i wish i shared your affinity for lists. :D

qudat
Would you be interested in a more traditional markdown blog platform using the same tech?
j3s
Most definitely.
blooalien
Nice. I'ma Python guy myself, but I been impressed by Charm since I first saw it, and have been waiting to see what sort of nifty things people might start building with it. Thanks much for sharing.
manapause
This is fantastic! Your bash-fu is strong, you bring great honor to our dojo.

This is so cool I dare say I am feeling inspired!

alephnan
Are there any known limitations?

Characters per line, number of items in the list?

qudat
There are no limitations to characters per line or number of items in a list. I might have to revise that later if I start noticing abuse.
qkhhly
apparently your username cannot start with the letter 'q'. lol...
qudat
Looking into this
qudat
I fixed this issue. Thanks again for submitting this issue.
mro_name
nice! how would I deploy without docker?

According the name I expected mere shall scripts.

tetek
nice! I was thinking on list social network, maybe I can dm you the idea, I would be interested to hear what you think.
qudat
Feel free to send me an email at: chat [at] erock.io
darrenf
Took me a couple of minutes to figure out why it was failing silently for me - I have ssh aliased to `kitty +kitten ssh`[0], which is obviously incompatible with charm.sh powered ssh apps. :) Works fine with unaliased ssh, of course. Great stuff OP.

[0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/

mataherry
Hi @qudat, first of all, this is an awesome work! I've tried ssh and scp successfully, but my blog is still empty. Would you mind checking it? Really appreciate it, thank you!

https://lists.sh/mataherry

qudat
Thanks for trying it out! I’ll look into it and post back asap.
qudat
Okay so I think the reason why you have no posts is because the files were marked as invalid. Did you try uploading a `.txt` file?
fareesh
Learning the specification is a bit of a downer. Any reason why you don't allow markdown?
qudat
Thanks for the feedback! I thought about using markdown but ultimately I felt like it didn't lend itself to making lists easy to write. There are also a lot of different flavors of markdown and a ton of features that I didn't want to immediately think about supporting or removing from an off-the-shelf parser / renderer.

Creating a simple spec was easy to write, easy to implement, and I can cater it specifically to parsing and rendering lists.

I am thinking about creating a more traditional blog platform with markdown support using the same SSH app techniques. Is that something that would interest you?

zikani_03
Nice work! Awesome to see something built of charm.sh libraries - love what those folks are doing.

Would be nice to have a way to have `checklists` too, I found this recently which looks cool: https://github.com/atolye15/checklist

qudat
Hey thanks! How do you envision checklists would work?
kuschkufan
Really cool. But obviously this will leak ssh private keys and your username to lists.sh

To prevent this I guess you have specify a username and create a specific key and use that: ssh -i key unknown@lists.sh

mijoharas
I think you mean public key rather than private.
kuschkufan
Correct...

Creating new keys and using those will also enable you to create multiple accounts on there.

Also, I think this service might need a reserved username list. admin, abuse, cgi or even ops, help, spec ..or ?foo=42 are all available and possible right now.

qudat
Hey thanks for the feedback. I agree and this is going to be a priority for me immediately after I triage the bug reports.
qudat
I’ve deployed your suggestions, thanks so much!
qudat
Thanks for submitting this feedback! We only record the public key that was accepted by the SSH app, but it's true, the logs could show all the public keys attempted for authentication.

I'm also going to update the docs to suggest providing your username for the service whenever logging in, in an effort to avoid leaking your host username unintentionally.