[HN Gopher] Blot turns a folder into a website
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Blot turns a folder into a website
Author : angrymouse
Score : 185 points
Date : 2023-12-29 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blot.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (blot.im)
| arepb wrote:
| Longtime fan of Blot and the founder's (David) work.
| james-bcn wrote:
| A similar thing: http://tiiny.host/
|
| I use them and I'm a big fan.
| freetonik wrote:
| It seems a bit different. Blot keeps pulling changes from
| Dropbox/Google Drive/etc, so you don't have to upload the
| folder manually.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| https://site44.com is kind of similar, except that all files
| in a given folder do not become public
| freetonik wrote:
| 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].
|
| 1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot
|
| 2. https://blot.im/news
| _0vzt wrote:
| Thanks for contributing - Rakhim created the 'questions' forum:
|
| https://blot.im/questions
| scoofy wrote:
| An interesting idea!
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _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)
| d_philla wrote:
| 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.
| dangwu wrote:
| We've come full circle
| thyrox wrote:
| If I remember correctly earliest version of Apache also did
| this (though it used S/FTP instead of dropbox and .html instead
| of .md)
| margalabargala wrote:
| Current versions of Apache also do this.
| otachack wrote:
| I laughed, thanks :D
|
| If there's anything to learn about humanity it's that we apply
| this technique in many ways.
| Nition wrote:
| Soon we may even be able to put a website into a folder.
| samstave wrote:
| CTRL+SHIFT+N New Folder/website
|
| EDIt: this is a good thing.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| The internet is made of tubes. And tubes are made of circles.
|
| 2024 is the year of PHP.
| iamcreasy wrote:
| How do projects like this routes traffic? Similar to ngrok?
| _hzw wrote:
| Does anyone remember scriptogr.am? It was a similar idea, but
| it's long gone now.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am
| ulrischa wrote:
| Would be cool if it could be self hosted
| starkparker wrote:
| It's not trivial and mostly undocumented, but not terrible.
| https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Isn't that literally just a web server?
| starkparker wrote:
| Only if the web server transparently converts non-HTML
| sources (Markdown, Word docs, Google docs, LaTeX, image
| galleries) into HTML on the fly.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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).
| myself248 wrote:
| Web browsers can render more than just HTML, can't they?
| Plain text at the very least, many do PDF as well.
|
| That function really seems like it should be in the browser
| anyway. The server serves, the renderer renders.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/10417/blot-im/3
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Haven't tried blot, but I discovered that with a basic stylesheet
| "tree -H" can be super useful.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Show ?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
|
| and that's about it!
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Oooooh, sorry, sorry. I was thinking more about the CSS !
|
| 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.
| starkparker wrote:
| Express application that converts files to HTML with pandoc and
| serves the results, with a dashboard.
|
| The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.
|
| 1:
| https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/blob/39d9583395c190534...
| btucker wrote:
| 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!
| manx wrote:
| Love the simplicity! Looks like this shouldn't need a server, but
| instead could just be a static site generator. Am I missing
| something?
| lpointal wrote:
| How do you want to serve pages without an http[s] server ?
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| aendruk wrote:
| Looks to be principally a turnkey service that shelters
| consumers from the details of web servers and static site
| generators.
| mikae1 wrote:
| If there only was a Docker image...
| pseudosavant wrote:
| Cool idea. This is a project I've done that feels in a similar
| vein. https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html
| _0vzt wrote:
| 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
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Just what I needed!
| slashink wrote:
| Been a happy customer since 2018! Thank you so much for making
| it.
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| 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!
| muhammadusman wrote:
| 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
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| if json and xml files become database tables we can get rid of
| everything else
| vsri wrote:
| I've been using Blot for years (for two websites), and I can't
| say enough good things about it. Happy to see it featured here!
| LanzVonL wrote:
| S-so does Apache?
| ravenstine wrote:
| 1. Old solution becomes new again
|
| 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
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(page generated 2023-12-29 23:00 UTC)