8 ms·
Blot turns a folder into a website
- james-bcn 3y agoA similar thing: http://tiiny.host/ http://tiiny.host/ I use them and I'm a big fan.
- freetonik 3y agoIt seems a bit different. Blot keeps pulling changes from Dropbox/Google Drive/etc, so you don't have to upload the folder manually.
- pazimzadeh 3y agohttps://site44.com https://site44.com is kind of similar, except that all files in a given folder do not become public
- sodapopcan 3y agoWhoa, “Remove ${HOST}’s banner”. That brings back memories.
- arepb 3y agoLongtime fan of Blot and the founder's (David) work.
- freetonik 3y agoI 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 https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot 2. https://blot.im/news https://blot.im/news
- _0vzt 3y agoThanks for contributing – Rakhim created the 'questions' forum: https://blot.im/questions https://blot.im/questions
- scoofy 3y agoAn interesting idea!
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. It turns a folder into a website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041158 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17314858 - June 2018 (120 comments) Blot – blogging from a Dropbox folder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078031 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183498 - Aug 2014 (36 comments)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- d_philla 3y agohttps://spinup.dev 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 3y agoWe've come full circle
- AlienRobot 3y agoThe internet is made of tubes. And tubes are made of circles. 2024 is the year of PHP.
- anyoneamous 3y agoWell, I'm off to learn about Apache Tomcat so I can be ready for 2025.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoJokes on you. I've been using PHP since.... 2001. Shit, that's a long time.
- lcof 3y agoPerl CGI is the way to go to get ready for 2026
- pjmlp 3y agoMaybe Vercel and Netfly could think about doing Perl serverless.
- thyrox 3y agoIf I remember correctly earliest version of Apache also did this (though it used S/FTP instead of dropbox and .html instead of .md)
- margalabargala 3y agoCurrent versions of Apache also do this.
- theyinwhy 3y agoSo what you are saying is that the web server Apache is able to serve static web content?
- iamcreasy 3y agoHow do projects like this routes traffic? Similar to ngrok?
- _hzw 3y agoDoes anyone remember scriptogr.am? It was a similar idea, but it's long gone now. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am
- ulrischa 3y agoWould be cool if it could be self hosted
- starkparker 3y agoIt's not trivial and mostly undocumented, but not terrible. https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIsn't that literally just a web server?
- starkparker 3y agoOnly if the web server transparently converts non-HTML sources (Markdown, Word docs, Google docs, LaTeX, image galleries) into HTML on the fly.
- myself248 3y agoWeb 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 3y agoif 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 3y agoHTML has this, yet browsers seem to cope...?
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
- nonrandomstring 3y agoHaven't tried blot, but I discovered that with a basic stylesheet "tree -H" can be super useful.
- johnchristopher 3y agoShow ?
- nonrandomstring 3y agoJust 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 3y agoOooooh, 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 3y agoExpress 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/39d9583395c190534bc2f1fc39683933833d67c2/todo.txt https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/blob/39d9583395c190534...
- Ringz 3y ago> The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating. I had no idea!
- low_tech_love 3y agoInteresting, he has links to his inbox in the file…!
- ukuina 3y agoUnusual, but not a security risk, I hope? Thankfully, only the first name of the recipients is listed.
- noduerme 3y agoFascinating as in should have been added to .gitignore?
- dgam 3y agoIt's intentionally public. The news page is generated from todo.txt and my git commit messages: https://blot.im/news https://blot.im/news
- btucker 3y agoThis makes me think of the early/mid-2000s & https://blosxom.sourceforge.net 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 3y agoThis 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoTry 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 3y agoLove the simplicity! Looks like this shouldn't need a server, but instead could just be a static site generator. Am I missing something?
- lpointal 3y agoHow do you want to serve pages without an http[s] server ?
- myself248 3y agoThe 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.
- nottorp 3y agoSometimes 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 3y agoThe link to a sepecific comment is on the timestamp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810949
- berkes 3y agoYou 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.
- mikae1 3y agoIf there only was a Docker image...
- pseudosavant 3y agoCool idea. This is a project I’ve done that feels in a similar vein. https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html
- every 3y agoI do a low-tech version[1] of this using tree-1.8.0... [1] https://every.sdf.org/ https://every.sdf.org/
- killingtime74 3y agoVery creative and retro!
- dgam 3y agoI 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 3y agoJust what I needed!
- slashink 3y agoBeen a happy customer since 2018! Thank you so much for making it.
- Sephr 3y agoPlease 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 https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot
- lolinder 3y agoTo 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.
- secondbreakfast 3y agoI 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 3y agoWow, 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 3y agoif json and xml files become database tables we can get rid of everything else
- vsri 3y agoI'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 3y agoS-so does Apache?
- khobragade 3y agoApache only listens to us nerds
- rcarmo 3y agoThis 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.
- ravenstine 3y ago1. 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 3y agoGOTO 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.pdf https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...
- withinboredom 3y agoI 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoYou can specify URLs for specific posts/pages via tags in the post/page file & then link to those URLs directly on other pages.
- galaxyLogic 3y agoI see. thanks
- algas 3y agoYou 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 3y agoCan someone explain this to us 35+ year olds? What am I missing?
- danesparza 3y agoI'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 3y agoIt's like if dropbox automatically exposed your files on the web.
- Dylan16807 3y agoI think you mean when, not if. The public folder feature was really nice.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoDrop had that features. I was warned multiple times when I started hosting my file download away from my website host to Dropbox.
- all2 3y agoBasically you provide the app a folder of files and that app transforms the files into web pages and then (maybe?) serves them.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoIt 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 3y ago"Static Site Generator as a Service."
- superkuh 3y agoYou 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 3y agoI 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/ http://ristrettoshots.com/ if anyone was curious what one take on a Blot photo site would look like.
- 4justinwilliams 3y agoAKA www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts
- khobragade 3y agoI 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 3y agoIs 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 https://blot.im/contact
- khobragade 3y ago> 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 3y agoHow 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 3y agoIt 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 3y agocaddy can serve markdown'ish files: https://caddy.community/t/markdown-support-in-v2/6984/8 https://caddy.community/t/markdown-support-in-v2/6984/8
- michaelquigley 3y agoI'm the lead developer of zrok. I've also had a habit of building static site generators over the years. Might be an interesting little crossover possibility. There's a bunch of zrok stuff in the pipeline that's way more important to get to first... but maybe down the line we can support some kind of extension mechanism in zrok and static site generators could just sort of snap right in... Stuff to think about anyway.
- janandonly 3y agoI’ve been a happy blot user for a while now. Thanks for building this. Also, my website is https://independentlypoor.com/ https://independentlypoor.com/
- sunnybeetroot 3y agoOn an iPhone 14 Pro your nav bar covers the content btw https://i.imgur.com/8OZTys7.png https://i.imgur.com/8OZTys7.png
- revskill 3y agoHow about dynamic data from remote db ?
- seper8 3y agoif only this website didnt autoplay
- mxsjoberg 3y agoI built something similar - https://github.com/mxsjoberg/md2website https://github.com/mxsjoberg/md2website
- jxdxbx 3y agoI love this service. Happy customer!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iamthepieman 3y agoIs 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.
- killingtime74 3y agoMaybe buy the hosted service (to pay them), don't use it, then just use the Open Source?
- MahmoudAhmad12 3y agoProps 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- harzach 3y agoI’ve been using blot for YEARS and there’s a huge segment of people in the ttrpg world who have followed suit after being burned by so many platforms. Dev has been super helpful and responsive. Will be a customer for life.