I briefly contributed to Blot (its code is Public Domain [1]). David keeps working on Blot constantly, and it's pretty cool to see the progress changelog with direct mapping to git commits [2].
https://spinup.dev is a similar thing I made a few years ago, with free analytics out-of-the-box for each deploy. Syncing changes is a feature I'd like to add, but time is tight for side-projects at the moment.
You used to be able to serve websites via a Dropbox of .html files. It supported CSS, JS and everything. At some point after 2015 they turned off that capability .
Especially older servers have quite a lot of those types of capabilities, rendering directories to fancy indexes, processing input files in various ways.
Like they'd even spawn arbitary processes for you (w/ CGI).
if the server side file format has something semantically similar to #include then your lovely simple binary model fails (without browsers having the same)
Just man tree if it's on your system. I used it for temporary jobs,
like where I needed to give some students a quick website of a folder
of source files. Not much to it.
-H baseHREF
Turn on HTML output, including HTTP references. Useful for ftp sites.
baseHREF gives the base ftp location when using HTML
output. That is, the local directory may be `/local/ftp/pub', but
it must be referenced as `ftp://hostname.organization.domain/pub'
(baseHREF should be `ftp://hostname.organization.domain').
Hint: don't use ANSI lines with this option, and don't give more
than one directory in the directory list. If you wish to use
colors via CSS style-sheet, use the -C option in addition to this
option to force color output.
-T title
Sets the title and H1 header string in HTML output mode.
This makes me think of the early/mid-2000s & https://blosxom.sourceforge.net. Blosxom had this delightful concept of file extensions as "flavours." For example, you could have a ".rss" flavour that would present that hierarchy of your site as an RSS feed if you added ".rss" to the URL. Brilliant!
This used to be fairly common. Reddit is another site. A company I worked at.aroind the same time also had .xml, .rss, .atom. .xml would serve up the raw xml our middleware generated, which was normally "rendered" via xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?) server side. It was great for both debugging (you could browse the site in "xml mode") and to provide an API.
I still like the url approach - being able to browse until you have the view you need, and then just copy the URL and change format in order to find the right API call can be very nice. The challenge, of course, is that you need to be very cautious about which urls you guarantee will be stable, or you'll be locked into a site structure you might regret.
The big problem was that the easy way out is that your XML ends up being changed to be "XSL-friendly", which means a ton of concessions that effectively encodes knowledge of the expected presentation no matter how much you want to keep it largely semantic.
Small presentation changes far too often result in changes to the XML to accommodate weaknesses in XSL.
I still like the idea. But not the use of XSL to achieve it. Unfortunately, we don't have any great alternatives that aren't horrible in all kinds of different ways.
The next innovation I expect to see on HN is a service that, on a set schedule, gathers articles about a set of topics that you follow, prints them out onto paper, and delivers them to you as a bound volume for easy perusal.
This has a number of advantages for privacy (there's no way for the publishers to know how much time you spent reading each story), offline-first availability (dead-tree is the ultimate), and sharing (you can hand someone the entire volume rather than just a link to it, and they get the whole contents, all offline).
It really sounds like it could be the hot new thing, if only some forward-thinking VC would invest in it.
You are joking, but I honestly would like it to get a personalized weekly collection of articles, a wiki lemma, a comic or two and some reviews delivered as PDF or on paper.
The crux being that it's personalized. It could use my Pocket, RSS reader, reddit/hn voting habits, even my bookmarks db as inspiration. I don't know or care, as long as it manages to deliver me a week's worth every week. Filled with content that I'm going to like 90% of the time, i'd love it and pay for it. I'd even accept ads every few pages.
From what I understand and from what I know of Google (or any big tech), this won't be a "weekly" digest, but rather a constant barrage of "personalized" attention seeking push notifications. Breaking news! Something you should comment on! This movie is trending, watch it now! Your friends have read this book, why haven't you!? Kinda stuff.
What I envisioned, is truly slow paced. Like the "old" in depth weekly magazines. Or journals. Something that I have a week to go through, and that doesn't get stale if I don't.
Maybe I should make it myself (though I guess that's my impulsive ADD brain tricking me into yet another hare chase)
You can get a subset of the English Wikipedia printed and bound, that gives you even more privacy, as you don't need to share the topics you are interested in with any electronic service.
Hint: Using a public (book) library also means your reading behavior is tracked by intelligence agencies, unfortunately, so you need to own the books you may want to read.
> prints them out onto paper, and delivers them to you as a bound volume for easy perusal.
You joke, but this would be great, and something that every digital solution has failed at replicating so far.
The best we have are newsletters (each from a different site/author) which clutter up my inbox and make me not want to read them. A printed weekly digest of everything (preferably with the comment threads included) would be a great way to spend a weekend.
I announced Blot on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. Thank you all for helping to get it started. It was a nice surprise to see it posted again here today.
The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven't heard of static site generators
To be fair, it's very clearly fronted on the Sign Up form, which has a prominent button in the top right corner. A dedicated Pricing page/section would be nice simply because people often look for it, but it's not like they're trying to be sneaky or use dark patterns.
Yeah, this is just a usability issue for sure. Unfortunately for me, I didn't want to click "sign up" until after I could locate the pricing, leading me into a catch-22 situation.
Personally it never even occurred to me that the "sign up" button would show pricing - in fact it wasn't even apparent that this was a paid product. Usually services have a separate "pricing" link somewhere at the top that explain things.
I pretty much never click on "sign up" buttons unless i have already been convinced the service is something i want to sign up for.
I agree sign-up is not how I would look for pricing. Sign-up is something I click when I'm ready to commit to using but until then I'm looking for information and I expect something like a Pricing page.
If I can't find the pricing I'm never going to click "sign up"
I think of a "sign up" button as something I click after I've chosen to use that product. The button click signals my intent to do so. Having to click it to see pricing is something that would just not happen for me, because I'd never intend to sign up without seeing pricing.
The interesting question is how did you arrive at this site layout where the pricing is hidden in the sign up page when every single SaaS site on the internet has a pricing link in the header and in the footer. Genuinely curious.
Ye "sign up" implies that you have accepted the pricing.
A common dark pattern is that you need to enter PI to get to the pricing so that they can call spam you forever. (I am not accusing the linked site of doing it, I haven't checked.)
Some people are pointing out that they found it easy to read your pricing before you added this site. I’d like to offer a different perspective. So many tech products and startups lack this sort of easy to find clarity.
Many times in my professional life we’ve dismissed products we might have bought if they had a pricing page as clear as yours. Not so much because they necessarily did anything wrong, but because we rarely have the time to “research” tech products that are “nice” but not “necessary”. So where some companies might have sold us an eternal product license for $5 a month, they didn’t because they didn’t have this sort of pricing page, where they very clearly explain the exact price of their product in as few words as possible. Some may find that ridiculous, but I’m fairly certain that if we do this, then others does as well as we’re very rarely unique.
One of the consequences of having done this professionally at many organisations for two decades is that I also do it as a private person. Maybe that’s even more lazy, but it is what it is.
I want to second this view--simple transparency and being upfront about pricing sets the tone for an entire ongoing relationship, and is even critical to beginning one. I have a 99 percent rejection rate of every website that doesn't put pricing up front, along with a customer service phone number. If I have to click more than once for pricing, and if that phone isn't on the landing page, the entire product goes straight into the ether. Ignoring these basics is a fundamental lack of respect for my time and attention as a customer, and I won't have it. I know this view is pervasive, yet dark patterns persist.
As a HN reader it was a little hard to figure out if this was a static site generator or a dynamic script like those old school php files that turned a folder of images into a image gallery website.
But for your target audience, it might be confusing to compare your service to those.
I used Blot for about 5 years for Second Breakfast. Its ease of use got me started blogging. Very cool app/service, highly recommend.
I had it strung up with RSS to Mailchimp to auto-send new posts to a mailing list. Recently just switched to Ghost to make that more integrated, we'll see how it goes!
Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never never heard of this and I’ve been working in web dev for 10+ years. I love this idea and I have some things I want to put out there without much management on my part. This will be perfect
It let's you create a simple web site without writing any HTML. You just provide a folder of files (text, photos) and choose a template, and it'll turn that into a web site for you.
142 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadI use them and I'm a big fan.
1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot
2. https://blot.im/news
https://blot.im/questions
Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. It turns a folder into a website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041158 - July 2022 (9 comments)
Blot – a blogging platform with no interface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17314858 - June 2018 (120 comments)
Blot – blogging from a Dropbox folder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078031 - Aug 2015 (17 comments)
Show HN: Blot, a static blog powered by Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183498 - Aug 2014 (36 comments)
If there's anything to learn about humanity it's that we apply this technique in many ways.
EDIt: this is a good thing.
2024 is the year of PHP.
What if I drop in a tf file?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am
Like they'd even spawn arbitary processes for you (w/ CGI).
That function really seems like it should be in the browser anyway. The server serves, the renderer renders.
https://nginx-extras.getpagespeed.com/modules/markdown/
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/10417/blot-im/3
But even so I didn't check out `-H`, I thought it was just the help flag and immediately thought the comment was a bit lacking, my bad.
The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.
1: https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/blob/39d9583395c190534...
I had no idea!
Thankfully, only the first name of the recipients is listed.
https://blot.im/news
I still like the url approach - being able to browse until you have the view you need, and then just copy the URL and change format in order to find the right API call can be very nice. The challenge, of course, is that you need to be very cautious about which urls you guarantee will be stable, or you'll be locked into a site structure you might regret.
Why? XSL is awesome even if a little arcane now.
Time makes fools of us all.
It's doable. It's also a massive pain.
The big problem was that the easy way out is that your XML ends up being changed to be "XSL-friendly", which means a ton of concessions that effectively encodes knowledge of the expected presentation no matter how much you want to keep it largely semantic.
Small presentation changes far too often result in changes to the XML to accommodate weaknesses in XSL.
I still like the idea. But not the use of XSL to achieve it. Unfortunately, we don't have any great alternatives that aren't horrible in all kinds of different ways.
This has a number of advantages for privacy (there's no way for the publishers to know how much time you spent reading each story), offline-first availability (dead-tree is the ultimate), and sharing (you can hand someone the entire volume rather than just a link to it, and they get the whole contents, all offline).
It really sounds like it could be the hot new thing, if only some forward-thinking VC would invest in it.
The crux being that it's personalized. It could use my Pocket, RSS reader, reddit/hn voting habits, even my bookmarks db as inspiration. I don't know or care, as long as it manages to deliver me a week's worth every week. Filled with content that I'm going to like 90% of the time, i'd love it and pay for it. I'd even accept ads every few pages.
What I envisioned, is truly slow paced. Like the "old" in depth weekly magazines. Or journals. Something that I have a week to go through, and that doesn't get stale if I don't.
Maybe I should make it myself (though I guess that's my impulsive ADD brain tricking me into yet another hare chase)
Hint: Using a public (book) library also means your reading behavior is tracked by intelligence agencies, unfortunately, so you need to own the books you may want to read.
Although it needs the context to really appreciate the funny.
You joke, but this would be great, and something that every digital solution has failed at replicating so far.
The best we have are newsletters (each from a different site/author) which clutter up my inbox and make me not want to read them. A printed weekly digest of everything (preferably with the comment threads included) would be a great way to spend a weekend.
The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven't heard of static site generators
Blot[1] (open source software) turns a folder into a website, and blot.im offers a hosted Blot service for $5/mo.
1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot
I pretty much never click on "sign up" buttons unless i have already been convinced the service is something i want to sign up for.
If I can't find the pricing I'm never going to click "sign up"
Anyway, it seems that they fixed it because there is a Pricing link in the menu now. Well done.
A common dark pattern is that you need to enter PI to get to the pricing so that they can call spam you forever. (I am not accusing the linked site of doing it, I haven't checked.)
https://blot.im/pricing
Many times in my professional life we’ve dismissed products we might have bought if they had a pricing page as clear as yours. Not so much because they necessarily did anything wrong, but because we rarely have the time to “research” tech products that are “nice” but not “necessary”. So where some companies might have sold us an eternal product license for $5 a month, they didn’t because they didn’t have this sort of pricing page, where they very clearly explain the exact price of their product in as few words as possible. Some may find that ridiculous, but I’m fairly certain that if we do this, then others does as well as we’re very rarely unique.
One of the consequences of having done this professionally at many organisations for two decades is that I also do it as a private person. Maybe that’s even more lazy, but it is what it is.
So I think you did well to add this!
But for your target audience, it might be confusing to compare your service to those.
I wanted to look into the developer guide to customizing a template. It's to add RTL support for Arabic content.
This give me error tho https://blot.im/developers
I had it strung up with RSS to Mailchimp to auto-send new posts to a mailing list. Recently just switched to Ghost to make that more integrated, we'll see how it goes!
2. Folks clamor that we actually had things right the first time
3. Hype dies down
4. Blog posts complain that the solution "just doesn't scale" and that the complete opposite approach (or some hybrid) is better
5. GOTO 1
1. Old solution becomes new again
Points 2 and 3
4. Dijkstra enters the picture with the paper: Go To Statement Considered Harmful [1]
5. Wait, did this ever happen? :’)
I wonder if there’s a modern language practice that extensively uses GOTO
[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...
I don't know why people don't like it -- it's essentially an unconditional jump (can replace all while(true);, for example).
So you cannot link to "posts"? Only to files whose names starts with underscore?
What part is confusing to you? I'm happy to help.
The public folder feature was really nice.