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JSON Configurable Personal Site
- amelius 11y agoI don't understand why we should use JSON to configure a server, when a much more powerful language exists: Javascript. For example, instead of hardcoding some setting in JSON, a Javascript configuration file could perform queries before configuring, or it could install callback functions as part of the configuration.
- abstractbeliefs 11y agoI don't understand why we should use JS to configure a server, when a much more pleasant language exists: Python. Ultimately, it's not about the language, it's about the simplicity. If you need more that what this does, you can go out and do that, but this looks like a wonderfully simple system where I can just write some information about myself and it uses that to build a site.
- JimDabell 11y ago> I don't understand why we should use JSON to configure a server, when a much more powerful language exists: Javascript. Because it's more powerful. More powerful, in many cases, is a worse thing. Executable imperative code isn't as flexible as a data file because all you can really do with it is execute it and take the output, rather than process it as you see fit. See: Rule of Least Power – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power Principle of Least Power – http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower
- amelius 11y agoThese articles are phrased as if they are facts. However, they are just some opinions that some people feel are useful. Take for instance the idea of the "semantic web", where information is stored neatly into proper html tags. It has turned out that this is not a very useful approach to storing information, and nowadays big search engines use machine learning techniques instead to extract the information.
- curiousjorge 11y agothere's one more step before that and it is YAML.
- raziel2p 11y agoI hate editing JSON by hand. Why not YAML?
- andybak 11y agoCame here to say exactly the same. It's so easy to support both and for anything where a human is expected to edit it by hand then YAML is far less user-hostile.
- shiggerino 11y agoJekyll uses YAML, which brings me to the question, what does this do besides JSON that Jekyll doesn't?
- smizell 11y agoI work at Apiary and we have a format called MSON for writing data structures in Markdown. https://github.com/apiaryio/mson/ https://github.com/apiaryio/mson/
- barosl 11y agoI think TOML[1] is a strict upgrade of JSON as a configuration file format. It has exactly the same expressiveness, but much more human-readable. [1] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml https://github.com/toml-lang/toml
- collyw 11y agoAgree completely. I have had to configure some relatively large forms in an application using JSON. Its not a particularly easy to read format, and when the nesting is deep its easy to loose a brace, or not notice a trailing comma in a list. (I don't know if YAML solves all of those problems, but it certainly looks easier to read).
- exodust 11y agoDo we know what's behind this on the server? Is this a Node.js thing? (perhaps obvious to many, but I'm not down with the server-side js scripting and templating lingo.) Creating a site from a json file sounds good. I defintely want to play with that, but what is required on server?
- avidas 11y agoThe site is a node app, so you would need node and npm (the package manager for node) on your system.
- avidas 11y agoGreat to see a fellow PayPal Austinite on HN Chris! For a lot of people really quick and easy way to have a personal site up and running. Couple suggestions, possibly add system requirements and deploy instructions (possibly deploy to heroku/or deploy to digitalocean button) ?
- christophior 11y agoJust saw this, thanks for the suggestions Avi! I'm currently messing around with it, I was already looking into one click deploy. I recall some time prior that Github unveiled a one click deploy button so I was going to try and integrate that into the repo.
- fiatjaf 11y agoYou know you could do this as a Jekyll site, right? And then you wouldn't even need to install Jekyll, you could just put everything on GitHub and it would render it for you. Then you could let people fork and modify the links and they would have their own sites too, without even downloading anything. Doing these with a backend is not fun at all: it is too easy to program (you know that with a node server you could do way more than a "JSON configurable personal site"), but it also consumes too much resources to run. So if you could do it without a backend, why not?
- christophior 11y agoNever used Jekyll before, thanks for the heads up. I'll look into it.
- fiatjaf 11y agoIt is not that I like Jekyll, but that GitHub pages supports it -- and compiles its sites on every deploy --, so it works well.