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Prose.sh – A blog platform for hackers

453 points by jstanley 4y ago

derekzhouzhen 4y ago
You have RSS which is nice, however, it is not advertised in the index html. Please see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types It is just a meta tag that will make every feed reader happy.
Lord_Zero 4y ago
I created a key with `ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"` and then connected with `ssh new@prose.sh` how did it know to use the new key I just created?
- tender_euler 4y ago
  It just tried out all keys you have until it worked. If you run `ssh new@prose.sh -v` you should see something like this after you closed the TUI: debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering public key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_rsa RSA SHA256:F67gFVIydWnAVPU6HcYUD/tEjmmgOgwFPs+dzELhgD8 debug1: send_pubkey_test: no mutual signature algorithm debug1: Trying private key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ecdsa debug1: Trying private key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ecdsa_sk debug1: Offering public key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ed25519 ED25519 SHA256:1H4mPO+WR0SMockqr+Vljy+1ht7bj/QIKL71d8nBIZk debug1: Server accepts key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ed25519 ED25519 SHA256:1H4mPO+WR0SMockqr+Vljy+1ht7bj/QIKL71d8nBIZk Authenticated to prose.sh ([2604:a880:800:10::8c1:e001]:22) using "publickey".
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
Honest question: why not Gemini and Gemtext support?
- emptysongglass 4y ago
  There's https://smol.pub https://smol.pub for that!
- layer8 4y ago
  Easier interoperability, more available tooling, less complexity by supporting only one format that is already wide-spread.
- FirstLvR 4y ago
  Gemini are liars, don’t trust
- qudat 4y ago
  One of our sibling services (https://lists.sh https://lists.sh) has support for Gemini. Because we are targeting people that would otherwise use something like Hugo, we wanted to offer rich markdown support. Converting GitHub flavored markdown to Gemini is work and we aren’t sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. If enough people feel otherwise I’d be happy to add it to the roadmap.
- asymmetric 4y ago
  Honest question: why Gemini and Gemtext support over Markdown?
danielvaughn 4y ago
Might want to rethink the name, as the tool seems very similar to https://prose.io/ https://prose.io/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- junon 4y ago
  "Prose" is an English word.
user00012-ab 4y ago
I click on "discover some interesting posts" and none of them were interesting; same issue I have with most everything on reddit, all the posts are "I POSTED!" The only reason I bring this up is because it is a "Platform for Hackers" but none of the posts really reflect anything like that. Just seems like another new site where people post the "I'm on this site now, and setup a default page" and then it never really goes beyond that. There was some pub/bar themed Gemini site awhile back, and every new post was some variation of being in a virtual pub; again, nothing interesting and I moved on.
- jstanley 4y ago
  That's the majority of everyone's first blog posts ever though. It's nothing wrong with this platform, that's just what people's first blog posts look like. Most people write 1 blog post, saying they have a blog, and then never write any more. That's fine. Any new blogging platform is going to first attract users who are new to blogging: everyone who is not new to blogging already has their blog set up, so unless they're particularly unhappy with it there is no reason for them to use a new blogging platform.
  - user00012-ab 4y ago
    It was mostly an "Old man yells at cloud" post. I'm always excited about small communities online, since in theory they aren't pandering to the lowest common denominator, so there is a chance they could have more specific and interesting content, like back in the day when magazines could target a specific group of people and have in depth articles on tech, instead of today where they have to write for the lowest common denominator to reach the most people for ads.
- layer8 4y ago
  The blogs https://erock.prose.sh/ https://erock.prose.sh/ and https://ben.prose.sh/ https://ben.prose.sh/ do have substantial content. Maybe give it some time?
  - user00012-ab 4y ago
elashri 4y ago
I always admired these kind of projects but unfortunately having a blog without JS means no LaTeX.
- detaro 4y ago
  You can run LaTeX-to-HTML/SVG/... server-side too.
- folmar 4y ago
  Tex4ht makes for a nice LaTeX to HTML renderer, use as static generator and JS is a non-issue.
layer8 4y ago
Hopefully they’ll be adding a light theme and prefers-color-scheme support.
- qudat 4y ago
  It is on the short list!
webwanderings 4y ago
What's the deal with copycats and similarities? This looks like a copy of bearblog.dev and one cannot tell who has copied whom. Is there anything on the Internet that is trustworthy anymore?
- metadat 4y ago
  Agreed, seeing both atop the frontpage simultaneously is confusing. An enlightening explanation for the rest of us would be great. For reference, here is the "Bear Blog" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127363
- protonbob 4y ago
  I think this is a great trend. Why have only one website doing it?
- qudat 4y ago
  Hi! Co-creator of prose.sh. This blog was heavily inspired by bear. We have acknowledgements at the bottom of this page: https://prose.sh/ops https://prose.sh/ops
  - gigatexal 4y ago
    This looks dope. I live at the command line and ssh is secure and good. Question on pricing. Because if I invest time in this I’d like to know it will be around. Sure I’ll have the data and can push to anything else but it’s still nice to know that this will be paid and reasonably around for years to come.
    - qudat 4y ago
      We have heard this a couple of times and read you loud and clear. We would price the blog to pay for its costs. Join #pico.sh on libera or sub to https://hey.prose.sh https://hey.prose.sh to get updates
      - 4y ago
ushakov 4y ago
how will you keep that thing afloat? do you plan making money?
qudat 4y ago
Hey all! Thanks to everyone for checking our prose! We just launched support for custom domains and plan to add image hosting shortly. We also have two sibling services that leverage the same technology: - https://lists.sh https://lists.sh — microblog for lists - https://pastes.sh https://pastes.sh — pastebin Also happy to answer any questions!
- carapace 4y ago
  First, congratulations, this seems really cool. :) My question is, how are you going to deal with spam and, y'know, bad stuff? Related to that, how do you contact users without an email address? (I know it's possible, like you could send a custom banner, I'm curious about how you do it.)
  - qudat 4y ago
    Spam and bad stuff: we are seeing if it’ll ever get to the scale that it’ll be an issue. Our hunch is since you have to use terminal tools to publish that it’ll weed out a lot of nefarious activity. Contacting users: this is a very interesting limitation that we want to see how far we can take it. Right now we have no way of contacting users and see that as a feature. Having said that we have an official blog (https://hey.prose.sh https://hey.prose.sh) with an RSS feed to notify users of updates.
    - ducktective 4y ago
      >since you have to use terminal tools to publish that it’ll weed out a lot of nefarious activity. Meanwhile: script kiddie copy-pasting noises
- ezekg 4y ago
  How does the SSH UI work? I thought that was pretty neat and a good way to give off a hacker vibe right off the bat.
  - birktj 4y ago
pwillia7 4y ago
I just got something setup pretty simple with Hugo, Netlify, GoogleDrive and a simple action. It's still a little much to be super accessible especially since you need to fuss over markdown editor settings for pasting images and I only know of Typora that does this well, but it's pretty manageable. That is my vision -- Something nice and simple to use like markdown in a Gdrive folder, flexibility and theme niceness of Hugo and full automation without ever needing to get into a terminal or repo unless you're coding. Last time I tried to do this with org mode but since decided, while I learned a lot of takeaways and had a good experience, org mode isn't something I want to use every day, or even emacs for that matter.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Don't have much to say about this other than that it's nice that it's just plain old HTML+CSS. However, I get white flashes of content every three or four times I navigate this website despite the CSS being downloaded just fine. Anyone have an idea why my browser won't cache the CSS?
blacklight 4y ago
I've checked this out with genuine interest because I've been looking for pure text file, Markdown-based blogging platform for a while. I built Madblog some months ago (https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog) to fill that gap. Madblog has a lot of the features I wanted (including RSS feeds, git versioning for the static files, a good looking index and LaTeX support), all while being purely staticly served with zero JavaScript. But now I feel the need for some more meaningful user interactions - adding comments on articles, preferably through Fediverse/OpenID login instead of using Disqus or other bloated stuff. But I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole implementation. Is there any source code for prose.sh by the way? Can it be self-hosted?
- eikenberry 4y ago
  Link is at the bottom. https://git.sr.ht/~erock/prose.sh https://git.sr.ht/~erock/prose.sh
woodruffw 4y ago
This is a cool idea (I love seeing clever uses of SSH, and this is definitely one of them), but I wonder who the intended audience is: it’s not complete novices or the non-technical, and it’s presumably not people like me (who already use an SSG + rsync over SSH to accomplish the same thing on their own).
- unsafecast 4y ago
  It's turnkey blogging but without the BS. There's blogger, and wordpress(.com), and a lot more, but I (and presumably you and OP) would take anything over those types of platforms. This fills the gap between 'do your own thing' and 'just use wordpress'.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
    - jll29 4y ago
      Very neat, from a technical perspective. I hope you don't have business aspirations, since from a business point of view, key creation may throw off 99% of potential user volume, so this limits your audience and growth. Out of curiosity, was this developed as an exercise in procrastination while preparing for a pharmacology exam?
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        I’m not the creator, so maybe this response was on the wrong comment? (I don’t think key creation throws off adoption by developers, who are clearly the target audience. I just didn’t understand which subset of developers was being targeted.)
  - pieix 4y ago
    For many, that gap is sufficiently filled by GitHub Pages.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stevenjgarner 4y ago
Kudos. How about a voting mechanism so that quality rises to the top?
- nope96 4y ago
  like https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/ ?
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  It is that sort of thing that ruins the internet
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    You mean like getting on page 1 of HN?
kaashif 4y ago
Maybe this doesn't make any sense, but when I write a blog post, I don't necessarily want lots of people to read it. My blog is primarily for me, the public nature of it just forces me to think about what I'm writing a bit more, and try to articulate my thoughts better. It seems that the main reason you'd post to a "blog platform" rather than just your own website or some GitHub pages thing is to get more people to read it, so I've never really been attracted to any of these things.
- deleted 4y ago
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mike-cardwell 4y ago
I selected username www and it told me I would find my blog at https://www.prose.sh https://www.prose.sh. Yet, I went to that URL, and found some other random persons content. Please remove that other persons content so I can display mine.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  Cmon dude
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    Hackers yo
    - austinjp 4y ago
      Testers, surely.
- qudat 4y ago
  Great catch! We need to add this to the deny list. Thanks for your feedback!
- fragmede 4y ago
  There’s a legend that a Facebook employee chose www for their username and broke all sorts of stuff.
  - patangay 4y ago
    Can confirm they started our as an intern, I had to fix the internal tools that broke. The main issue was that at this point in time, we were relying on people’s Unix names to directly to setup the person’s dev box. Obviously, <unixname>.dev.facebook.com with the unixname of www was going to lead to issues. It just broke things internally and was fixed pretty quickly.
  - gfosco 4y ago
    That is a real thing that happened.
mholt 4y ago
I see something about using Caddy in the repo. Nice! That's a great solution for custom domain TLS.
- antoniomika 4y ago
  Thanks for Caddy :) I use certmagic for a different project, but saw on_demand_tls with the ask feature and knew it was a good fit!
brad0 4y ago
What’s the value of this over GitHub Pages?
- nephanth 4y ago
  Nice TUI it seems
jll29 4y ago
2 bug reports: * dashes in file names (that become blog post titles) are elminated! ( proof: https://leidner.prose.sh/welcome-2022-07-17 https://leidner.prose.sh/welcome-2022-07-17 ) * my blog's first post has a wrong date ("01 Jan, 0001"; proof: https://leidner.prose.sh/ https://leidner.prose.sh/ )
- pixel_turkey 4y ago
  I ran into the date thing too, but found the option for metadata here: https://prose.sh/help https://prose.sh/help
  - unraveller 4y ago
    i wish it had "published: false" flag in case you accidentally upload an unfinished file.
- qudat 4y ago
  Date issue has been fixed. I wonder if we should just replace underscores with spaces but not hyphens to avoid this collision with hyphens you want to keep? There’s also the frontmatter variable “title” that you can customize. Thanks for the feedback!
gtirloni 4y ago
> In order for this to work, 2 DNS records need to be created: >CNAME for the domain to prose I don't think RFC 1034 even allows that (zone apex must be A record). https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-record-be-used-at-the-apex-aka-root-of-a-domain https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-re...
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  If you use Cloudflare, it will do "CNAME Flattening" for you
- booi 4y ago
  It's strange they even put an example but it would never work. You could use cloudflare DNS to approximate a CNAME? Or prose has an A record that you could use? Not sure how this slipped by.
- xxdesmus 4y ago
  CNAME flattening works just fine and is supported by a variety of DNS providers at this point, but yes — there’s an RFC otherwise.
- antoniomika 4y ago
  Yep you’re right! My example was done with a CNAME on a subdomain (replaced the domain for privacy), and most providers provide flattening so I didn’t even think about it! I’ll update the copy to mention that.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    Even for a subdomain, having CNAME and TXT records on the same name isn't supposed to be okay; normally you'd work around it by reading the TXT record off an other unlikely-to-be-used subdomain of the name you're putting a CNAME on.
    - antoniomika 4y ago
      Now that's one I never knew about. I'll have to take a look, should be easy enough to update prose to handle that though. edit: Updated prose to handle this
junon 4y ago
New posts are showing Jan 1, 0000 as the date. Did I miss something?
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Hmmm, if the date is related to any client-side entries, this could be used to post backdated blogs.
- joeycodes 4y ago
  This was not immediately clear to me either. It seems to require date metadata inside the post. https://prose.sh/help#blog-metadata https://prose.sh/help#blog-metadata Would be neat if instead it defaulted to using the mod-time of the file, if the metadata is not present.
- qudat 4y ago
  This bug has been fixed, sorry about that!
  - junon 4y ago
    Thanks! Cool site, really like it. Are you using Charm CLI?
budoso 4y ago
I could see this being really useful in conjunction with iOS shortcuts’ “Run Script Over SSH” and “Get Contents of URL” actions.
jmclnx 4y ago
Very interesting concept, too late in the evening for me now, but will give it a try very soon.
Zopieux 4y ago
Fun fact: if you set a date: in the future (not sure how much but 2042-01-01 worked), neither the HTML index nor the SSH interface will list your post -- though it's definitely here and accessible using the filename.
- qudat 4y ago
  That’s partially by design. The ssh app should show the post, that’s a bug. However posts in the future do not show up in the indexes so you can upload the post without it being publicly listed. I’ll fix the bug, thanks!
waynesonfire 4y ago
Why would I use ssh to manage a blog? What a weird interface. Maybe I'm not hackering hard enough. I'll pass.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Keeps people who don't know ssh out
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zxwrt 4y ago
Please add ipv6 support.
notnmeyer 4y ago
this is really cool. great work!
nojvek 4y ago
Q: I use GH pages for my simple site. Why would I use prose over GH pages with a simple action to turn markdown + template —> html and put it on a GH-pages branch for publish?
- toastal 4y ago
  GitHub Pages (or many alternative static hosts) will be more rich experience as you can control the rendering pipeline and the presentation (CSS). This looks to take some of the concern away and focus on the content instead of presentation and build pipelines (which limits expression). Both options, the code isn't on your own server which could pose a 'freedom' risk depending on what you're saying as well as limited ability to modify the server (like adding Brotli compression (both only seem to provide GZip only) and adding security headers; see Prose.sh has an F score on Mozilla Observatory https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/prose.sh https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/prose.sh which will carry over to your blog). GitHub will mean you're on a proprietary, closed-source, Microsoft-owned platform top to bottom vs. Prose which is open source on SourceHut.
  - qudat 4y ago
    Great response! I added a ticket to improve our http rating: https://todo.sr.ht/~erock/pico.sh/27 https://todo.sr.ht/~erock/pico.sh/27
binwiederhier 4y ago
Slightly off topic, but the page says "we don't want your email" and I vaguely remember a site that was looking up public keys on GitHub and getting the email address from the GitHub account. Not sure if I got that right, or what the site name was, but it's definitely possible to get public keys from GitHub users like so: https://github.com/binwiederhier.keys https://github.com/binwiederhier.keys If you mine these, along with crawling GitHub for email addresses, you can map public keys to email addresses.
- drKarl 4y ago
  Best practice and what everyone should be doing is have different ssh key for every different server, that is, create a new ssh key for prose.sh with a custom file name. Of course there will be many people reusing the same key for everything and I think it's obvious that doing that increases the risk exposure
binwiederhier 4y ago
I have a .sh domain (https://ntfy.sh https://ntfy.sh). Maybe I should rebrand and call it "push notifications for hackers" ;-) -- Maybe I'd get more traffic that way, hmm. No but in all seriousness, there are a lot of "for hackers" sites out there it seems
- gerikson 4y ago
  I mean, it's posted on a site that's about news for hackers...
vorticalbox 4y ago
As this is for hackers what is your stance on posting exploits, sqli, xss etc?
altilunium 4y ago
https://rtnf.prose.sh/prose-sublime-text-integration https://rtnf.prose.sh/prose-sublime-text-integration Upload directly from your text editor. Ctrl+B to upload.
- unraveller 4y ago
  on windows you can type cmd into any windows explorer address bar and have command line open at that folder. Useful for markdown editors that have no integrations but offer a way to show file in a new explorer window.
AnonHP 4y ago
For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator. The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements. I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version. I don’t think supporting custom domains and images (the latter said to be coming soon) can be effortless for the platform maintainers. Since that author is here responding to comments, I’d like to know more about plans for pricing.
- qudat 4y ago
  > For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator. We're contemplating the idea of adding "Pages" to prose.sh. > The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements. Yeah I reached for postgres because that's what I'm comfortable with. I probably should have just went with sqlite but here we are. > I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version. As of right now, it costs us $8.25/mo to host prose.sh. You can find transparency details here: https://prose.sh/transparency https://prose.sh/transparency We are definitely looking into a paid subscription service, especially if we add image hosting to the list. The goal would be to cover costs and ensure the service is up and running for years. We also plan to send "profits" to open source projects. The numbers will all be documented on the transparency page I linked above when it is official. Happy to answer any follow up questions about it!
toastal 4y ago
Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc. Another red flag to me is supporting GitHub-flavored Markdown over CommonMark which actually tries to follow good standards practice for everyone. Instead projects like Pandoc have to work hard on alternative parsers because GitHub does whatever it wants with little regard for CommonMark's RFC, and in some cases, even basic semantic HMTL.
- qudat 4y ago
  > Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc. Really excellent point. Instead of markdown, what would you suggest?
  - toastal 4y ago
    AsciiDoc or reStructuredText. Maybe Org Mode, but I don’t know as much about it.
- ranguna 4y ago
  If you are adding a lot of html into prose, then I'm not sure you really want a microblog. The limitations of markdown are a feature here.
  - toastal 4y ago
    There is no mention of “microblog” on the page. If you’re implying “a blog platform for hackers” means ‘hackers’ don’t need proper tools for providing a semantic blogging, then ‘hackers’ need to get better at communication because these sorts of features matter for accessibility and experience.
miyuru 4y ago
any plans to add IPv6 support? not reachable from my IPv6 only VPS.
rawoke083600 4y ago
This very neat and well done ! I'm holding out for a lispy/Clojure variant :P
drKarl 4y ago
This looks great, a while ago I was thinking it would be great to have a blogging platform that would be easy to use, no tracking, no ads, and effectively anonymous. The anonymous part obviously depends on your secops but this ticks all the boxes. As others have asked, I wonder about long term survival of the project so what are your monetization options? Since its no ads no tracking which is one of the best features it would have to be freemium model or even donation, and since one of the potential use cases is anonymous blogging it should have the option to pay with crypto (something like Monero). You can always self-host but it's more burdensome, even if you know how to do it (most people using this service will know how to self-host a blog or would be able to figure it out), and if you want an anonymous blog and you self host you would have to figure out how to anonymously pay for your server. I do have a Hugo blog hosted on Netlify for free and configured to my own domain but as a command line lover prose.sh looks great (mind you the workflow to edit and publish using a Hugo blog on Netlify or anywhere else is pretty much also command line centric). It would be great to be able to also push your own themes on prose.sh to customize the look and feel of your blog though.

453 points by jstanley 4y ago

You have RSS which is nice, however, it is not advertised in the index html. Please see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types It is just a meta tag that will make every feed reader happy.

Lord_Zero 4y ago

I created a key with `ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"` and then connected with `ssh new@prose.sh` how did it know to use the new key I just created?

tender_euler 4y ago
It just tried out all keys you have until it worked. If you run `ssh new@prose.sh -v` you should see something like this after you closed the TUI: debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Offering public key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_rsa RSA SHA256:F67gFVIydWnAVPU6HcYUD/tEjmmgOgwFPs+dzELhgD8 debug1: send_pubkey_test: no mutual signature algorithm debug1: Trying private key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ecdsa debug1: Trying private key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ecdsa_sk debug1: Offering public key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ed25519 ED25519 SHA256:1H4mPO+WR0SMockqr+Vljy+1ht7bj/QIKL71d8nBIZk debug1: Server accepts key: /home/tender_euler/.ssh/id_ed25519 ED25519 SHA256:1H4mPO+WR0SMockqr+Vljy+1ht7bj/QIKL71d8nBIZk Authenticated to prose.sh ([2604:a880:800:10::8c1:e001]:22) using "publickey".

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

Honest question: why not Gemini and Gemtext support?

emptysongglass 4y ago
There's https://smol.pub https://smol.pub for that!
layer8 4y ago
Easier interoperability, more available tooling, less complexity by supporting only one format that is already wide-spread.
FirstLvR 4y ago
Gemini are liars, don’t trust
qudat 4y ago
One of our sibling services (https://lists.sh https://lists.sh) has support for Gemini. Because we are targeting people that would otherwise use something like Hugo, we wanted to offer rich markdown support. Converting GitHub flavored markdown to Gemini is work and we aren’t sure if the juice is worth the squeeze. If enough people feel otherwise I’d be happy to add it to the roadmap.
asymmetric 4y ago
Honest question: why Gemini and Gemtext support over Markdown?

danielvaughn 4y ago

Might want to rethink the name, as the tool seems very similar to https://prose.io/ https://prose.io/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
junon 4y ago
"Prose" is an English word.

user00012-ab 4y ago

I click on "discover some interesting posts" and none of them were interesting; same issue I have with most everything on reddit, all the posts are "I POSTED!" The only reason I bring this up is because it is a "Platform for Hackers" but none of the posts really reflect anything like that. Just seems like another new site where people post the "I'm on this site now, and setup a default page" and then it never really goes beyond that. There was some pub/bar themed Gemini site awhile back, and every new post was some variation of being in a virtual pub; again, nothing interesting and I moved on.

jstanley 4y ago
That's the majority of everyone's first blog posts ever though. It's nothing wrong with this platform, that's just what people's first blog posts look like. Most people write 1 blog post, saying they have a blog, and then never write any more. That's fine. Any new blogging platform is going to first attract users who are new to blogging: everyone who is not new to blogging already has their blog set up, so unless they're particularly unhappy with it there is no reason for them to use a new blogging platform.
- user00012-ab 4y ago
  It was mostly an "Old man yells at cloud" post. I'm always excited about small communities online, since in theory they aren't pandering to the lowest common denominator, so there is a chance they could have more specific and interesting content, like back in the day when magazines could target a specific group of people and have in depth articles on tech, instead of today where they have to write for the lowest common denominator to reach the most people for ads.
layer8 4y ago
The blogs https://erock.prose.sh/ https://erock.prose.sh/ and https://ben.prose.sh/ https://ben.prose.sh/ do have substantial content. Maybe give it some time?
- user00012-ab 4y ago

elashri 4y ago

I always admired these kind of projects but unfortunately having a blog without JS means no LaTeX.

detaro 4y ago
You can run LaTeX-to-HTML/SVG/... server-side too.
folmar 4y ago
Tex4ht makes for a nice LaTeX to HTML renderer, use as static generator and JS is a non-issue.

layer8 4y ago

Hopefully they’ll be adding a light theme and prefers-color-scheme support.

qudat 4y ago
It is on the short list!

webwanderings 4y ago

What's the deal with copycats and similarities? This looks like a copy of bearblog.dev and one cannot tell who has copied whom. Is there anything on the Internet that is trustworthy anymore?

metadat 4y ago
Agreed, seeing both atop the frontpage simultaneously is confusing. An enlightening explanation for the rest of us would be great. For reference, here is the "Bear Blog" thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127363
protonbob 4y ago
I think this is a great trend. Why have only one website doing it?
qudat 4y ago
Hi! Co-creator of prose.sh. This blog was heavily inspired by bear. We have acknowledgements at the bottom of this page: https://prose.sh/ops https://prose.sh/ops
- gigatexal 4y ago
  This looks dope. I live at the command line and ssh is secure and good. Question on pricing. Because if I invest time in this I’d like to know it will be around. Sure I’ll have the data and can push to anything else but it’s still nice to know that this will be paid and reasonably around for years to come.
  - qudat 4y ago
    We have heard this a couple of times and read you loud and clear. We would price the blog to pay for its costs. Join #pico.sh on libera or sub to https://hey.prose.sh https://hey.prose.sh to get updates
    - 4y ago

ushakov 4y ago

how will you keep that thing afloat? do you plan making money?

qudat 4y ago

Hey all! Thanks to everyone for checking our prose! We just launched support for custom domains and plan to add image hosting shortly. We also have two sibling services that leverage the same technology: - https://lists.sh https://lists.sh — microblog for lists - https://pastes.sh https://pastes.sh — pastebin Also happy to answer any questions!

carapace 4y ago
First, congratulations, this seems really cool. :) My question is, how are you going to deal with spam and, y'know, bad stuff? Related to that, how do you contact users without an email address? (I know it's possible, like you could send a custom banner, I'm curious about how you do it.)
- qudat 4y ago
  Spam and bad stuff: we are seeing if it’ll ever get to the scale that it’ll be an issue. Our hunch is since you have to use terminal tools to publish that it’ll weed out a lot of nefarious activity. Contacting users: this is a very interesting limitation that we want to see how far we can take it. Right now we have no way of contacting users and see that as a feature. Having said that we have an official blog (https://hey.prose.sh https://hey.prose.sh) with an RSS feed to notify users of updates.
  - ducktective 4y ago
    >since you have to use terminal tools to publish that it’ll weed out a lot of nefarious activity. Meanwhile: script kiddie copy-pasting noises
ezekg 4y ago
How does the SSH UI work? I thought that was pretty neat and a good way to give off a hacker vibe right off the bat.
- birktj 4y ago

pwillia7 4y ago

I just got something setup pretty simple with Hugo, Netlify, GoogleDrive and a simple action. It's still a little much to be super accessible especially since you need to fuss over markdown editor settings for pasting images and I only know of Typora that does this well, but it's pretty manageable. That is my vision -- Something nice and simple to use like markdown in a Gdrive folder, flexibility and theme niceness of Hugo and full automation without ever needing to get into a terminal or repo unless you're coding. Last time I tried to do this with org mode but since decided, while I learned a lot of takeaways and had a good experience, org mode isn't something I want to use every day, or even emacs for that matter.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Don't have much to say about this other than that it's nice that it's just plain old HTML+CSS. However, I get white flashes of content every three or four times I navigate this website despite the CSS being downloaded just fine. Anyone have an idea why my browser won't cache the CSS?

blacklight 4y ago

I've checked this out with genuine interest because I've been looking for pure text file, Markdown-based blogging platform for a while. I built Madblog some months ago (https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/madblog) to fill that gap. Madblog has a lot of the features I wanted (including RSS feeds, git versioning for the static files, a good looking index and LaTeX support), all while being purely staticly served with zero JavaScript. But now I feel the need for some more meaningful user interactions - adding comments on articles, preferably through Fediverse/OpenID login instead of using Disqus or other bloated stuff. But I don't feel like going down that rabbit hole implementation. Is there any source code for prose.sh by the way? Can it be self-hosted?

eikenberry 4y ago
Link is at the bottom. https://git.sr.ht/~erock/prose.sh https://git.sr.ht/~erock/prose.sh

woodruffw 4y ago

This is a cool idea (I love seeing clever uses of SSH, and this is definitely one of them), but I wonder who the intended audience is: it’s not complete novices or the non-technical, and it’s presumably not people like me (who already use an SSG + rsync over SSH to accomplish the same thing on their own).

unsafecast 4y ago
It's turnkey blogging but without the BS. There's blogger, and wordpress(.com), and a lot more, but I (and presumably you and OP) would take anything over those types of platforms. This fills the gap between 'do your own thing' and 'just use wordpress'.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Makes sense, thanks for the explanation.
  - jll29 4y ago
    Very neat, from a technical perspective. I hope you don't have business aspirations, since from a business point of view, key creation may throw off 99% of potential user volume, so this limits your audience and growth. Out of curiosity, was this developed as an exercise in procrastination while preparing for a pharmacology exam?
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I’m not the creator, so maybe this response was on the wrong comment? (I don’t think key creation throws off adoption by developers, who are clearly the target audience. I just didn’t understand which subset of developers was being targeted.)
- pieix 4y ago
  For many, that gap is sufficiently filled by GitHub Pages.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stevenjgarner 4y ago

Kudos. How about a voting mechanism so that quality rises to the top?

nope96 4y ago
like https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/ ?
jimmygrapes 4y ago
It is that sort of thing that ruins the internet
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  You mean like getting on page 1 of HN?

kaashif 4y ago

Maybe this doesn't make any sense, but when I write a blog post, I don't necessarily want lots of people to read it. My blog is primarily for me, the public nature of it just forces me to think about what I'm writing a bit more, and try to articulate my thoughts better. It seems that the main reason you'd post to a "blog platform" rather than just your own website or some GitHub pages thing is to get more people to read it, so I've never really been attracted to any of these things.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mike-cardwell 4y ago

I selected username www and it told me I would find my blog at https://www.prose.sh https://www.prose.sh. Yet, I went to that URL, and found some other random persons content. Please remove that other persons content so I can display mine.

indigodaddy 4y ago
Cmon dude
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Hackers yo
  - austinjp 4y ago
    Testers, surely.
qudat 4y ago
Great catch! We need to add this to the deny list. Thanks for your feedback!
fragmede 4y ago
There’s a legend that a Facebook employee chose www for their username and broke all sorts of stuff.
- patangay 4y ago
  Can confirm they started our as an intern, I had to fix the internal tools that broke. The main issue was that at this point in time, we were relying on people’s Unix names to directly to setup the person’s dev box. Obviously, <unixname>.dev.facebook.com with the unixname of www was going to lead to issues. It just broke things internally and was fixed pretty quickly.
- gfosco 4y ago
  That is a real thing that happened.

mholt 4y ago

I see something about using Caddy in the repo. Nice! That's a great solution for custom domain TLS.

antoniomika 4y ago
Thanks for Caddy :) I use certmagic for a different project, but saw on_demand_tls with the ask feature and knew it was a good fit!

brad0 4y ago

What’s the value of this over GitHub Pages?

nephanth 4y ago
Nice TUI it seems

jll29 4y ago

2 bug reports: * dashes in file names (that become blog post titles) are elminated! ( proof: https://leidner.prose.sh/welcome-2022-07-17 https://leidner.prose.sh/welcome-2022-07-17 ) * my blog's first post has a wrong date ("01 Jan, 0001"; proof: https://leidner.prose.sh/ https://leidner.prose.sh/ )

pixel_turkey 4y ago
I ran into the date thing too, but found the option for metadata here: https://prose.sh/help https://prose.sh/help
- unraveller 4y ago
  i wish it had "published: false" flag in case you accidentally upload an unfinished file.
qudat 4y ago
Date issue has been fixed. I wonder if we should just replace underscores with spaces but not hyphens to avoid this collision with hyphens you want to keep? There’s also the frontmatter variable “title” that you can customize. Thanks for the feedback!

gtirloni 4y ago

> In order for this to work, 2 DNS records need to be created: >CNAME for the domain to prose I don't think RFC 1034 even allows that (zone apex must be A record). https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-record-be-used-at-the-apex-aka-root-of-a-domain https://serverfault.com/questions/613829/why-cant-a-cname-re...

RockRobotRock 4y ago
If you use Cloudflare, it will do "CNAME Flattening" for you
booi 4y ago
It's strange they even put an example but it would never work. You could use cloudflare DNS to approximate a CNAME? Or prose has an A record that you could use? Not sure how this slipped by.
xxdesmus 4y ago
CNAME flattening works just fine and is supported by a variety of DNS providers at this point, but yes — there’s an RFC otherwise.
antoniomika 4y ago
Yep you’re right! My example was done with a CNAME on a subdomain (replaced the domain for privacy), and most providers provide flattening so I didn’t even think about it! I’ll update the copy to mention that.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Even for a subdomain, having CNAME and TXT records on the same name isn't supposed to be okay; normally you'd work around it by reading the TXT record off an other unlikely-to-be-used subdomain of the name you're putting a CNAME on.
  - antoniomika 4y ago
    Now that's one I never knew about. I'll have to take a look, should be easy enough to update prose to handle that though. edit: Updated prose to handle this

junon 4y ago

New posts are showing Jan 1, 0000 as the date. Did I miss something?

IncRnd 4y ago
Hmmm, if the date is related to any client-side entries, this could be used to post backdated blogs.
joeycodes 4y ago
This was not immediately clear to me either. It seems to require date metadata inside the post. https://prose.sh/help#blog-metadata https://prose.sh/help#blog-metadata Would be neat if instead it defaulted to using the mod-time of the file, if the metadata is not present.
qudat 4y ago
This bug has been fixed, sorry about that!
- junon 4y ago
  Thanks! Cool site, really like it. Are you using Charm CLI?

budoso 4y ago

I could see this being really useful in conjunction with iOS shortcuts’ “Run Script Over SSH” and “Get Contents of URL” actions.

jmclnx 4y ago

Very interesting concept, too late in the evening for me now, but will give it a try very soon.

Zopieux 4y ago

Fun fact: if you set a date: in the future (not sure how much but 2042-01-01 worked), neither the HTML index nor the SSH interface will list your post -- though it's definitely here and accessible using the filename.

qudat 4y ago
That’s partially by design. The ssh app should show the post, that’s a bug. However posts in the future do not show up in the indexes so you can upload the post without it being publicly listed. I’ll fix the bug, thanks!

waynesonfire 4y ago

Why would I use ssh to manage a blog? What a weird interface. Maybe I'm not hackering hard enough. I'll pass.

mhh__ 4y ago
Keeps people who don't know ssh out
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

zxwrt 4y ago

Please add ipv6 support.

notnmeyer 4y ago

this is really cool. great work!

nojvek 4y ago

Q: I use GH pages for my simple site. Why would I use prose over GH pages with a simple action to turn markdown + template —> html and put it on a GH-pages branch for publish?

toastal 4y ago
GitHub Pages (or many alternative static hosts) will be more rich experience as you can control the rendering pipeline and the presentation (CSS). This looks to take some of the concern away and focus on the content instead of presentation and build pipelines (which limits expression). Both options, the code isn't on your own server which could pose a 'freedom' risk depending on what you're saying as well as limited ability to modify the server (like adding Brotli compression (both only seem to provide GZip only) and adding security headers; see Prose.sh has an F score on Mozilla Observatory https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/prose.sh https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/prose.sh which will carry over to your blog). GitHub will mean you're on a proprietary, closed-source, Microsoft-owned platform top to bottom vs. Prose which is open source on SourceHut.
- qudat 4y ago
  Great response! I added a ticket to improve our http rating: https://todo.sr.ht/~erock/pico.sh/27 https://todo.sr.ht/~erock/pico.sh/27

binwiederhier 4y ago

Slightly off topic, but the page says "we don't want your email" and I vaguely remember a site that was looking up public keys on GitHub and getting the email address from the GitHub account. Not sure if I got that right, or what the site name was, but it's definitely possible to get public keys from GitHub users like so: https://github.com/binwiederhier.keys https://github.com/binwiederhier.keys If you mine these, along with crawling GitHub for email addresses, you can map public keys to email addresses.

drKarl 4y ago
Best practice and what everyone should be doing is have different ssh key for every different server, that is, create a new ssh key for prose.sh with a custom file name. Of course there will be many people reusing the same key for everything and I think it's obvious that doing that increases the risk exposure

binwiederhier 4y ago

I have a .sh domain (https://ntfy.sh https://ntfy.sh). Maybe I should rebrand and call it "push notifications for hackers" ;-) -- Maybe I'd get more traffic that way, hmm. No but in all seriousness, there are a lot of "for hackers" sites out there it seems

gerikson 4y ago
I mean, it's posted on a site that's about news for hackers...

vorticalbox 4y ago

As this is for hackers what is your stance on posting exploits, sqli, xss etc?

altilunium 4y ago

https://rtnf.prose.sh/prose-sublime-text-integration https://rtnf.prose.sh/prose-sublime-text-integration Upload directly from your text editor. Ctrl+B to upload.

unraveller 4y ago
on windows you can type cmd into any windows explorer address bar and have command line open at that folder. Useful for markdown editors that have no integrations but offer a way to show file in a new explorer window.

AnonHP 4y ago

For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator. The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements. I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version. I don’t think supporting custom domains and images (the latter said to be coming soon) can be effortless for the platform maintainers. Since that author is here responding to comments, I’d like to know more about plans for pricing.

qudat 4y ago
> For something that seems to be lightweight and simple, I’d have liked to see it being file based or like a static site generator. We're contemplating the idea of adding "Pages" to prose.sh. > The official documentation for self-hosting this refers to Postgres (and Docker, to make it easier). That seems heavy on resource requirements. Yeah I reached for postgres because that's what I'm comfortable with. I probably should have just went with sqlite but here we are. > I also didn’t find any pricing information for the hosted version. As of right now, it costs us $8.25/mo to host prose.sh. You can find transparency details here: https://prose.sh/transparency https://prose.sh/transparency We are definitely looking into a paid subscription service, especially if we add image hosting to the list. The goal would be to cover costs and ensure the service is up and running for years. We also plan to send "profits" to open source projects. The numbers will all be documented on the transparency page I linked above when it is official. Happy to answer any follow up questions about it!

toastal 4y ago

Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc. Another red flag to me is supporting GitHub-flavored Markdown over CommonMark which actually tries to follow good standards practice for everyone. Instead projects like Pandoc have to work hard on alternative parsers because GitHub does whatever it wants with little regard for CommonMark's RFC, and in some cases, even basic semantic HMTL.

qudat 4y ago
> Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc. Really excellent point. Instead of markdown, what would you suggest?
- toastal 4y ago
  AsciiDoc or reStructuredText. Maybe Org Mode, but I don’t know as much about it.
ranguna 4y ago
If you are adding a lot of html into prose, then I'm not sure you really want a microblog. The limitations of markdown are a feature here.
- toastal 4y ago
  There is no mention of “microblog” on the page. If you’re implying “a blog platform for hackers” means ‘hackers’ don’t need proper tools for providing a semantic blogging, then ‘hackers’ need to get better at communication because these sorts of features matter for accessibility and experience.

miyuru 4y ago

any plans to add IPv6 support? not reachable from my IPv6 only VPS.

rawoke083600 4y ago

This very neat and well done ! I'm holding out for a lispy/Clojure variant :P

drKarl 4y ago

This looks great, a while ago I was thinking it would be great to have a blogging platform that would be easy to use, no tracking, no ads, and effectively anonymous. The anonymous part obviously depends on your secops but this ticks all the boxes. As others have asked, I wonder about long term survival of the project so what are your monetization options? Since its no ads no tracking which is one of the best features it would have to be freemium model or even donation, and since one of the potential use cases is anonymous blogging it should have the option to pay with crypto (something like Monero). You can always self-host but it's more burdensome, even if you know how to do it (most people using this service will know how to self-host a blog or would be able to figure it out), and if you want an anonymous blog and you self host you would have to figure out how to anonymously pay for your server. I do have a Hugo blog hosted on Netlify for free and configured to my own domain but as a command line lover prose.sh looks great (mind you the workflow to edit and publish using a Hugo blog on Netlify or anywhere else is pretty much also command line centric). It would be great to be able to also push your own themes on prose.sh to customize the look and feel of your blog though.