Show HN: Git Hooting (git.ht)

You gave me an idea I might build in a hour (or you can)

In vanilla JS write code that fetches and reasonable formats gists. Then sitename.com/githubuser generates a SPA blog client side based on that user. Can be hosted on netlify with no maintenance forever.

An example of something like this is my HN Badges which has been hosted for almost 2 years with zero thought from me! E.g. https://hnbadges.netlify.app/?user=quickthrower2

When you slim down the grammar of the input just enough but not too much (which the Markdown community and GitHub have already done), syndication and presentation and maybe even monetization as concerns gain tons of degrees of freedom.

As someone who routinely tries to squeeze long-form content into something social-media sized, who prefers hacker authoring tools, and is mostly at home in a revision-controlled text workflow? I’d probably have a blog if there was something lower-effort than Jekyll but with more cachet than Substack. And if this exists (which it might) it hasn’t been marketed to me.

RSS is okay enough as a syndication format, but it’s been a long time since it was front-and-center for readers. There is a bunch of interesting stuff going on around Mastodon and Bluesky and stuff, maybe there’s a clever (ab)use of some modern distribution protocol.

Another thing:

> This application will be able to read and write your public and *secret* gists.

That said, I always found Gists a weird fit for blogging.

- no way to recover them if you accidentally deleted one

- subpar Git experience compared to plain git. (Yes, gists are git repos so you can clone them, but still there's no web ui for them and you don't have write access to those repos)

- an unnecessary extra layer with it's own quirks and limitations. Why not use plain git/GitHub instead?

- no way to use organize hierarchically

- GitHub deciding to change something (e.g. they are now auto-expire after 1 year) and your blog is broken

- (probably more?)

The only things I can come up with for them is that (a) it's GitHub, (b) they're free and zero-maintenance and (c) they come with a UI.

I see the appeal of using them as a platform for a blog, and the idea is neat, but if you really do care about your blog I can't imagine relying on them for it. It feels like using the wrong tool for the job.

1. have a free tier, completely free if you hoot once a month or something like that, otherwise your subdomain deletes itself.

2. change the pricing from $3 per month or whatever, to like $19.95 per year. I’m not sure if other people feel this way, but in 2023 I’m feeling pretty hostile to subscriptions that want to charge me a few dollars per month (and hike their prices randomly after I’ve bought-in) and prefer to outright purchase things

3. make it better than a static site generator by adding extra features ie optionally let people login with GitHub or Google or whatever and comment on posts

4. connect to own custom domain, pretty straightforward why people might want this, especially if you can get it to automatically renew let’s encrypt https and stuff like that

Speaking of which, I can't place the accent of the speaker. Sometimes the R's are rhotic ("load balancer"), most of the time not. Very confusing.

You can try it for free by simply going though with the first step: login with Github and give app necessary permissions. Everything will just work after that. You'll have a few days until the subdomain gets reclaimed into the available pool.

If you pay for subscription even once, even if subsequently you decide to cancel it, subdomain remains yours, links won't break, RSS feed will continue to be served but new hoots won't be fetched until you subscribe again.

Thank you for trying it and git hooting

2. The (strangely written IMO) website copy claims there are comments, but I can’t see them on https://vlad.git.ht/2bbf002723aeec77713a8692db2198d3 . Do I need to click through onto GitHub somehow?

3. How do I publish multiple posts? How can I get an index of posts (in a web browser, not in a RSS reader)? I can see multiple posts in the RSS feed https://vlad.git.ht/feed/rss , but those are not discoverable by humans. The single post page has no link (<link> nor <a>) to the RSS feed.

4. The RSS feeds seem to contain raw HTML from the Gist embedding service, including an advertisement for GitHub and some SVG embedded in EVERY post.

4. Going to https://vlad.git.ht/ gets you a very confusing “Are you vlad? | Then you know what to do | Login →” page. Why is this page targeted at vlad but not vlad’s readers? What should vlad’s readers do when they remove the commit hash from the URL and get to the main page?

5. Why would I pay $4/month for this if I can do it for free with any static site generator and GitHub Pages, and it would have much better quality than this?

Firstly, some context. I consider git.ht alpha, which I candidly stated above. Naturally some features and niceties are missing. I opted to get the meat of it out to seek feedback and there's only so many hours a parent of 3 can devote to hacking while running a Clojure consultancy with deadlines lurking, contracts needing attention, payroll, etc. Please keep that lack of time in mind, when asking "why isn't there ..." and "I would've expected ...". Good chance I would've expected the same thing you would and the thing you miss is a TODO somewhere in the code :) Great place to report these: https://github.com/fullmeta-dev/githoot-public/issues

Secondly, my intention is not to get as many eyeballs as I can to my platform and website by re-creating feeds, following, timelines, comments, editing, etc badly. Haven't we enough of these already? Once you claim your git.ht subdomain and subscribe, there should be little reason for you to go back there. Instead I want to leverage what good Github platform gives us already. Everyone here uses it every day anyway. I haven't the time of day to learn your new social whatever, so I wouldn't put you through the pain I'd never choose to endure. Good example is the "feed" or "timeline". Sure, I can add one to your foo.git.ht, but why though? GitHub Gist search works really well. Here's the query to get your hoot feed: "user:foo filename:hoot". It just works. In fact, if you claim a subdomain and then go to your foo.git.ht "dashboard", the last item is "Search your feed". All it does is redirect you to that search with the exact query string I mentioned earlier.

To sum up. Some features are coming and some niceties are missing, I explicitly solicit feedback and discussion in the Github issues mentioned above. Github platform is good enough and if it has something already, I'd rather not roll out my own and add to the noise.

With that, now that the kids are finally asleep, let's see about those questions.

1. Where are comments?

   Github Gists offer great comment section. I say we use it.

   Would this really be useful? git.ht is meant to be minimal and trivial to use. Your RSS feed is available under /feed/rss and you need to know how to map a gist to where its hosted by your git.ht. /latest is a convenient way to quickly grab and share the hoot you just authored and want to share. We could ofcourse allow query parameters to /latest. Given that it is your subdomain and therefore only limited to your hoots, a better idea would be to use a monotonically increasing enumeration scheme as well as gist's hash, your hoots will then be under /1 /2 /3 ... Very easy to keep in your head if you want to share your old hoot on a whim without searching or checking.

   Perhaps a HOWTO hoot or a video tutorial might be useful even if just me using it for 5 minutes.

   Re mentioned accounts. I shouldn't be using my own vlad.git.ht for testing. Spring cleaning incoming. I kind of question the usefulness of posting announcements on hq.git.ht now so it remains empty.

   RSS feed is the timeline, but also the above mentioned Github Gists search works very well. Search with the necessary query pre-populated is linked from your "dashboard". git.ht is not...