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.
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.
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.
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].
I recently migrated my own static Hugo blog onto Blot, and I just about couldn’t be happier with it.
I’m not versed in web development, but Blot’s developer (David) seems to have a great goal in mind & similar enough priorities to what I wanted that it was a great fit. I finally got to set up the photography site I’d been planning, too.
It’s http://ristrettoshots.com/ if anyone was curious what one take on a Blot photo site would look like.
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 .
Readit News
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
https://blot.im/pricing
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
The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.
1: https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/blob/39d9583395c190534...
https://blot.im/news
Thankfully, only the first name of the recipients is listed.
I had no idea!
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)
Deleted Comment
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.
1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot
2. https://blot.im/news
https://blot.im/questions
I’m not versed in web development, but Blot’s developer (David) seems to have a great goal in mind & similar enough priorities to what I wanted that it was a great fit. I finally got to set up the photography site I’d been planning, too.
It’s http://ristrettoshots.com/ if anyone was curious what one take on a Blot photo site would look like.
EDIt: this is a good thing.
2024 is the year of PHP.
If there's anything to learn about humanity it's that we apply this technique in many ways.
What if I drop in a tf file?
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).