[HN Gopher] Blot turns a folder into a website
___________________________________________________________________
Blot turns a folder into a website
Author : angrymouse
Score : 498 points
Date : 2023-12-29 19:26 UTC (1 days 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
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Whoa, "Remove ${HOST}'s banner". That brings back memories.
| 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.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Well, I'm off to learn about Apache Tomcat so I can be ready
| for 2025.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Jokes on you. I've been using PHP since.... 2001. Shit,
| that's a long time.
| lcof wrote:
| Perl CGI is the way to go to get ready for 2026
| pjmlp wrote:
| Maybe Vercel and Netfly could think about doing Perl
| serverless.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Now how do I serve my micro service from here? Just drop in a
| js, py or rb file :-)
|
| What if I drop in a tf file?
| djbusby wrote:
| WTF is "tf"?
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Terraform i assume
| rchaud wrote:
| 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 .
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| if the server side file format has something semantically
| similar to #include then your lovely simple binary model
| fails (without browsers having the same)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| HTML has this, yet browsers seem to cope...?
| roywiggins wrote:
| nginx has a lot of modules, this one can render markdown
| apparently
|
| https://nginx-extras.getpagespeed.com/modules/markdown/
| 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...
| Ringz wrote:
| > The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.
|
| I had no idea!
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Interesting, he has links to his inbox in the file...!
| noduerme wrote:
| Fascinating as in should have been added to .gitignore?
| _0vzt wrote:
| It's intentionally public. The news page is generated from
| todo.txt and my git commit messages:
|
| https://blot.im/news
| 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!
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| djbusby wrote:
| > xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?)
|
| Why? XSL is awesome even if a little arcane now.
|
| Time makes fools of us all.
| vidarh wrote:
| Try to format dates in a generic way with XSL.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| berkes wrote:
| 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.
| zeekaran wrote:
| This is what Google promised, and I hope the near future
| of AI is able to deliver on.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Sometimes I wish you could link directly to specific
| comments on HN to pass around...
|
| Although it needs the context to really appreciate the
| funny.
| jstanley wrote:
| The link to a sepecific comment is on the timestamp:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810949
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I'm guessing they mean non-static server. I.e. just nginx
| without node or php or ruby or python should suffice to serve
| the static files.
| 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.
| Sephr wrote:
| Please increase your pricing transparency. I could not easily
| figure out the price of your hosted service without having to
| use a search engine.
|
| 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
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| Sephr wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Did you think it would sign you up without confirmation
| or something? It seems strange to me to not want to hit
| sign up to see how much it would cost.
| hiddencost wrote:
| HubSpot popularized collecting emails before providing
| pricing. A lesson from corporate sales in other
| industries. (Urgh)
| rchaud wrote:
| But at least they'd offer something, even if it was just
| tepid whitepaper about CRMs or email marketing.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| voidfunc wrote:
| 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"
| swells34 wrote:
| 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.
| heliodor wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| I second this. Why would I want to click a sign up link
| without knowing the price in advance? No price no sale.
| Every service has a pricing page.
|
| Anyway, it seems that they fixed it because there is a
| Pricing link in the menu now. Well done.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 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.)
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I second this, in fact from the site i didn't even knew this
| was something you'd pay for or that it was open source.
| _0vzt wrote:
| Fair point - I have just added:
|
| https://blot.im/pricing
| devjab wrote:
| 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.
|
| So I think you did well to add this!
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| seventhtiger wrote:
| This seems like a very nice product.
|
| 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
| fnord77 wrote:
| Are table of contents on posts possible?
| 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?
| khobragade wrote:
| Apache only listens to us nerds
| 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
| mettamage wrote:
| GOTO
|
| 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...
| withinboredom wrote:
| I use goto whenever I have the opportunity, which, sadly, is
| not that often.
|
| I don't know why people don't like it -- it's essentially an
| unconditional jump (can replace all while(true);, for
| example).
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > Files and folders whose name starts with an underscore do not
| become posts or pages. You can link to or embed them in posts.
|
| So you cannot link to "posts"? Only to files whose names starts
| with underscore?
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| You can specify URLs for specific posts/pages via tags in the
| post/page file & then link to those URLs directly on other
| pages.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I see. thanks
| algas wrote:
| You can link to posts. I imagine this feature is mainly to have
| images to use in blog posts that do not become standalone pages
| on their own.
| puttycat wrote:
| Can someone explain this to us 35+ year olds? What am I missing?
| danesparza wrote:
| I'm 48 and I get this (although I prefer Hugo and Github
| pages).
|
| What part is confusing to you? I'm happy to help.
| hkon wrote:
| It's like if dropbox automatically exposed your files on the
| web.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I think you mean when, not if.
|
| The public folder feature was really nice.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Drop had that features. I was warned multiple times when I
| started hosting my file download away from my website host to
| Dropbox.
| all2 wrote:
| Basically you provide the app a folder of files and that app
| transforms the files into web pages and then (maybe?) serves
| them.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| ok123456 wrote:
| "Static Site Generator as a Service."
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is pretty much how my website worked back when running
| Dropbox as a headless service on Linux was "easy" and bloat-free.
| Glad to see it as a service.
| every wrote:
| I do a low-tech version[1] of this using tree-1.8.0...
|
| [1] https://every.sdf.org/
| superkuh wrote:
| You know what else turns a folder into a website? Installing
| nginx from your distro repositories. Then every folder beneath
| the www dir is a website. I'm not joking around. Files in folders
| is really the best way to make websites.
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| 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.
| 4justinwilliams wrote:
| AKA www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts
| khobragade wrote:
| I sort of have a bad taste about this project. I'll use proper
| support channels and won't rant here, but what happened was that
| my card was being declined trying to sign up. Thought I could
| self-host on a linode somewhere given the code is in the public
| domain, but there is no documentation :/
| _0vzt wrote:
| Is it possible that you are in India and affected by recurring
| billing regulations? Email us and we'll get you up and running:
|
| https://blot.im/contact
| khobragade wrote:
| > Is it possible that you are in India
|
| I am, unfortunately.
|
| > Email us and we'll get you up and running
|
| Will do. Thank you very much!
| eternityforest wrote:
| How does this compare to Zrok's integrated server? I've been very
| impressed with zrok even though I haven't done anything with it
| in production yet.
| dovholuknf wrote:
| It might be more similar to zrok's caddy integration where you
| can get "fancier" than just delivering files? Blot is trying to
| do different stuff than zrok is it seems. Like, it's processing
| markdown, zrok doesn't try to do that for example. zrok is more
| about sharing easily. blot doesn't appear to be open source
| from what i can tell and it's not self-hostable as far as I can
| tell. seems pretty different overall. I'm not exactly sure what
| blot is trying to do/be.
| Piraty wrote:
| caddy can serve markdown'ish files:
| https://caddy.community/t/markdown-support-in-v2/6984/8
| janandonly wrote:
| I've been a happy blot user for a while now.
|
| Thanks for building this.
|
| Also, my website is https://independentlypoor.com/
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| On an iPhone 14 Pro your nav bar covers the content btw
| https://i.imgur.com/8OZTys7.png
| revskill wrote:
| How about dynamic data from remote db ?
| seper8 wrote:
| if only this website didnt autoplay
| mxsjoberg wrote:
| I built something similar -
| https://github.com/mxsjoberg/md2website
| jxdxbx wrote:
| I love this service. Happy customer!
| iamthepieman wrote:
| Is there an option to pay and to self host? Recently my boss
| asked me for things to spend money on to use up some budget at
| the end of the year. We can't use hosting services but would pay
| for support or an "enterprise" edition if we could host it
| ourselves. Probably not your market but just something to
| consider.
| MahmoudAhmad12 wrote:
| Props to _0vzt for keeping Blot rocking for a decade - it's like
| they've got a secret sauce for static site magic. And yeah,
| Sephr's right about needing clearer pricing. It's like playing
| hide and seek with numbers! Lastly, devjab's take on pricing
| clarity is spot on. It's a breath of fresh air when you don't
| have to turn into a detective to figure out what something costs.
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(page generated 2023-12-30 23:01 UTC)