5 ms·

Show HN: Beautiful and Ridiculously Fast Websites With Static Blogging

28 points by calebhicks 13y ago

calebhicks 13y ago
A group of us got together and put this together. We decided that Wordpress sucked for us. Then we stepped into static blogging with Pelican. Then we realized that static blogging kinda sucks too. Setting it up and the dearth of themes are rough. Can you give us some feedback? We're still working on this together, and would love to hear what you guys think.
- underwater 13y ago
  Great idea and presentation. A few immediate questions: What are the limits of what I can do with this? Can I add commenting, tags or search? How easy is it to edit the pages (what syntax do I use)? And why do I need to provide a host? Paying a little extra for included hosting seems a no brainer.
  - calebhicks 13y ago
    Great questions. Commenting is made possible with Disqus, the third-party comment system. Search can be done using Google custom search. We're looking into better ways to do this. Sites are updated using Markdown or LaTex. We're looking at building hosting into this as well. For now, we're helping make it easier and pushing it to your FTP or S3 buckets.
  - roberthahn 13y ago
    This is the kind of thing I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] would be well suited for. They appear to have tuned their servers and business model for static web sites - if they don't serve any of your files, you pay nothing. Otherwise, you pay only for what you use. Disclaimer: I've never used their services, but I've checked them out from time to time. [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting
- marquis 13y ago
  I know people who run galleries and such things, who find Wordpress too complicated. Markdown is great because they can do rich formatting without needing to learn HTML, but with more control that WYSIWYG. Maybe you want to post a tutorial to add a CNAME to Dropbox. I don't think they really care that the urls would look like /u/xyz/file.html|jpg. What's missing is a markdown editor and light CMS, perhaps.
beambot 13y ago
So... kinda like a cross between WooThemes and jekyll (or hyde)? Seems like a pretty good idea -- especially for a large subset of business websites where <favorite CMS> is overkill.
- aharris88 13y ago
  Yeah, so it actually is using Jekyll right now for the engine, and we plan to support Pelican in the future. You can just buy our themes if you want, or you can use our engine to generate your posts in the cloud without all the setup.
  - etler 13y ago
    So is the target audience non technical people (or people who can't be bothered)? Sounds like a good idea. I love jekyll, but I can't recommend it to anyone not comfortable with HTML and CSS.
    - jkhowland 13y ago
      That's the exact same problem we had, and all of our potential clients had. We want to make it easier to use, more accessible. We talked to 3 types of customers. The non-technical were largely disinterested. We're still too early for that. Agencies were all over this for their clients though. Great feedback from them.
joshbaptiste 13y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787317
- jkhowland 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. This was a post we pushed earlier, we weren't quite ready to open the doors yet. This post is a more comprehensive overview of what we're trying to do.
ricardobeat 13y ago
That logo is taken http://dcurt.is/ http://dcurt.is/
- bsamuels 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't have a monopoly on using stylized thunderbolts as a logo.
  - wmeredith 13y ago
    True, but his brand is already powerful and has established meanings and connections in the same market with his blogging platform. It's not illegal or anything, but why fight a mindshare battle you don't have to?
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    He might have if he trademarked it. A logo being simple doesn't mean it can be copied at will (e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Nike, Mercedes). Point is, as wmeredith pointed out, he is well known among web designers/developers, created Svbtle (a competing blogging platform), and has been using that as his personal logo for as long as I can remember, maybe half a decade.
livestyle 13y ago
Interested in your strategy for ecommerce sites. I wonder if foxycart integration would make sense.
waps 13y ago
I don't get this. As fast as static blogging is, in-memory applications: 1) will actually beat static files in speed 2) you lose none of the flexibility of databases. In fact, because your effective query impact is going to be much smaller, you gain. Not in what can theoretically be done, but in what can be done practically without impact on response time, you gain a lot. Also expressivity gains (SQL is good, but it doesn't match general programming languages) (e.g. drawing a graph of "this person replies to this person and never replies to this other person" would be feasible). I suppose there's problems too: 3) you lose that your state is always on-disk. In other words : there's a chance that you/your developer will get it wrong, but you won't notice it until your process restarts, which can be months. 4) of course, you have to start monitoring memory usage in these kinds of scenarios.
- argonaut 13y ago
  ... Serving up static HTML/CSS/JS will always be faster than having to render on the server-side. Now the tradeoff is that you can't have certain dynamic elements based on state unless you use a third party service (i.e. comments). But that's obvious.
  - waps 13y ago
    No it won't. There's lots of problems with doing that. 1) you need to -at least- check the disk for updates. On linux, you need to update access time. This will take time. In memory has no such obligations. 2) you still need to compress the file in memory. You can cache the result of the compression, but that won't buy you much. Specifically it'll be too large to ... see point 3. 3) Because in practice pages are generated from very little data (the template is -way- shorter than the filled in sent out text), the ability to work with the data in little pieces without allocating large buffers in memory will avoid trampling the cache, which is going to get you an insurmountable advantage. And this is ignoring the elephants in the room: 1) Because it's a static file, you'll have to send more data to the client side in total to achieve the same result (e.g. look at how GWT does it, and even there). 2) Because you still want to show customers "their" page, you'll need several more roundtrips to achieve the same with javascript that you wouldn't need with server pages (Note how one of the GWT pagespeed optimizations is to dynamically generate the page initialization data using the webserver to avoid an initial roundtrip). 3) Pure static files lose you a lot of features. Comments, scores, ... none of that. That may or may not be acceptable.
gexla 13y ago
I was looking for something like this the other day and found a mine-field of services which seemed like they never went anywhere. Sometimes I would like to be able to throw up a site where I can create content using something like Editorially, have automatically backed up and not have to mess with everything else involved in running a site and making sure content is backed up. I was looking for something which could run Markdown files from Dropbox (and pick the folder from which they are pulled.) I would also like to be able to make posts (or even the entire site) private if needed (publishing workflow.)

28 points by calebhicks 13y ago

A group of us got together and put this together. We decided that Wordpress sucked for us. Then we stepped into static blogging with Pelican. Then we realized that static blogging kinda sucks too. Setting it up and the dearth of themes are rough. Can you give us some feedback? We're still working on this together, and would love to hear what you guys think.

underwater 13y ago
Great idea and presentation. A few immediate questions: What are the limits of what I can do with this? Can I add commenting, tags or search? How easy is it to edit the pages (what syntax do I use)? And why do I need to provide a host? Paying a little extra for included hosting seems a no brainer.
- calebhicks 13y ago
  Great questions. Commenting is made possible with Disqus, the third-party comment system. Search can be done using Google custom search. We're looking into better ways to do this. Sites are updated using Markdown or LaTex. We're looking at building hosting into this as well. For now, we're helping make it easier and pushing it to your FTP or S3 buckets.
- roberthahn 13y ago
  This is the kind of thing I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] would be well suited for. They appear to have tuned their servers and business model for static web sites - if they don't serve any of your files, you pay nothing. Otherwise, you pay only for what you use. Disclaimer: I've never used their services, but I've checked them out from time to time. [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting
marquis 13y ago
I know people who run galleries and such things, who find Wordpress too complicated. Markdown is great because they can do rich formatting without needing to learn HTML, but with more control that WYSIWYG. Maybe you want to post a tutorial to add a CNAME to Dropbox. I don't think they really care that the urls would look like /u/xyz/file.html|jpg. What's missing is a markdown editor and light CMS, perhaps.

beambot 13y ago

So... kinda like a cross between WooThemes and jekyll (or hyde)? Seems like a pretty good idea -- especially for a large subset of business websites where <favorite CMS> is overkill.

aharris88 13y ago
Yeah, so it actually is using Jekyll right now for the engine, and we plan to support Pelican in the future. You can just buy our themes if you want, or you can use our engine to generate your posts in the cloud without all the setup.
- etler 13y ago
  So is the target audience non technical people (or people who can't be bothered)? Sounds like a good idea. I love jekyll, but I can't recommend it to anyone not comfortable with HTML and CSS.
  - jkhowland 13y ago
    That's the exact same problem we had, and all of our potential clients had. We want to make it easier to use, more accessible. We talked to 3 types of customers. The non-technical were largely disinterested. We're still too early for that. Agencies were all over this for their clients though. Great feedback from them.

joshbaptiste 13y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787317

jkhowland 13y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. This was a post we pushed earlier, we weren't quite ready to open the doors yet. This post is a more comprehensive overview of what we're trying to do.

ricardobeat 13y ago

That logo is taken http://dcurt.is/ http://dcurt.is/

bsamuels 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't have a monopoly on using stylized thunderbolts as a logo.
- wmeredith 13y ago
  True, but his brand is already powerful and has established meanings and connections in the same market with his blogging platform. It's not illegal or anything, but why fight a mindshare battle you don't have to?
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  He might have if he trademarked it. A logo being simple doesn't mean it can be copied at will (e.g. Apple, McDonalds, Nike, Mercedes). Point is, as wmeredith pointed out, he is well known among web designers/developers, created Svbtle (a competing blogging platform), and has been using that as his personal logo for as long as I can remember, maybe half a decade.

livestyle 13y ago

Interested in your strategy for ecommerce sites. I wonder if foxycart integration would make sense.

waps 13y ago

I don't get this. As fast as static blogging is, in-memory applications: 1) will actually beat static files in speed 2) you lose none of the flexibility of databases. In fact, because your effective query impact is going to be much smaller, you gain. Not in what can theoretically be done, but in what can be done practically without impact on response time, you gain a lot. Also expressivity gains (SQL is good, but it doesn't match general programming languages) (e.g. drawing a graph of "this person replies to this person and never replies to this other person" would be feasible). I suppose there's problems too: 3) you lose that your state is always on-disk. In other words : there's a chance that you/your developer will get it wrong, but you won't notice it until your process restarts, which can be months. 4) of course, you have to start monitoring memory usage in these kinds of scenarios.

argonaut 13y ago
... Serving up static HTML/CSS/JS will always be faster than having to render on the server-side. Now the tradeoff is that you can't have certain dynamic elements based on state unless you use a third party service (i.e. comments). But that's obvious.
- waps 13y ago
  No it won't. There's lots of problems with doing that. 1) you need to -at least- check the disk for updates. On linux, you need to update access time. This will take time. In memory has no such obligations. 2) you still need to compress the file in memory. You can cache the result of the compression, but that won't buy you much. Specifically it'll be too large to ... see point 3. 3) Because in practice pages are generated from very little data (the template is -way- shorter than the filled in sent out text), the ability to work with the data in little pieces without allocating large buffers in memory will avoid trampling the cache, which is going to get you an insurmountable advantage. And this is ignoring the elephants in the room: 1) Because it's a static file, you'll have to send more data to the client side in total to achieve the same result (e.g. look at how GWT does it, and even there). 2) Because you still want to show customers "their" page, you'll need several more roundtrips to achieve the same with javascript that you wouldn't need with server pages (Note how one of the GWT pagespeed optimizations is to dynamically generate the page initialization data using the webserver to avoid an initial roundtrip). 3) Pure static files lose you a lot of features. Comments, scores, ... none of that. That may or may not be acceptable.

gexla 13y ago

I was looking for something like this the other day and found a mine-field of services which seemed like they never went anywhere. Sometimes I would like to be able to throw up a site where I can create content using something like Editorially, have automatically backed up and not have to mess with everything else involved in running a site and making sure content is backed up. I was looking for something which could run Markdown files from Dropbox (and pick the folder from which they are pulled.) I would also like to be able to make posts (or even the entire site) private if needed (publishing workflow.)