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Disadvantages: Not for the non-geeky. You can only post from a computer where you have your static site generator set up Not necessarily. I have a very simple
by riobard 15y ago
Disadvantages: Not for the non-geeky. You can only post from a computer where you have your static site generator set up
Not necessarily. I have a very simple static site generator (basically a single Python script, plus a few dependencies) running on a EC2 Micro instance. It watches changes in a shared Dropbox folder (using inotify and dropboxd) of a bunch of Markdown files and templates, and generates HTML posts, index page, and RSS automatically. I could post from any machine as long as it has my Dropbox account, even on my iPhone! No more command lines or git stuff, just write. Dropbox will take care of the rest.
Joe Hewitt's Nerve [1] works this way. I believe Marco Arment's Second Crack works similarly, too, but it's not open sourced yet.
[1]: https://github.com/joehewitt/nerve/ https://github.com/joehewitt/nerve/
- bsphil 15y agoSounds like it still requires more setup than the average non-geek is willing to do.
- masnick 15y agoYes -- if you're comfortable with the command line and a scripting language, you can set up a script to handle your static blog. However, I suspect most people who want to blog don't have these skills or don't want to spend the time messing with the tech.
- jQueryIsAwesome 15y agoActually it would be pretty easy to create a Wordpress plugin to do something very similar; using ob_start of php and keeping the real wordpress installation inside a subfolder. I am pretty busy this days but if someone wants to create and opensource project that hundreds of people would love, that would surely be one.
- riobard 15y agoSure. I'm not addressing the non-geeky part of the problem :)
- zrail 15y agoIf someone hadn't set this up as a hosted system I would have done so tomorrow, but it turns out there's already a hosted markdown + Dropbox thing out there: http://calepin.co/ http://calepin.co/
- riobard 15y agoActually I've tried Calepin before creating my own solution. Calepin is 99% of what I need, but the last 1%, that Calepin requires me to click the "Publish" on their site every time, drives me nuts. I just want to save the Markdown file and it automatically appears on my site. This isn't Calepin's fault, though. It's because Dropbox doesn't support event notification yet. The offical Dropbox API cannot inform a 3rd-party app that something changes in a user's Dropbox folder. So the app has to poll, which isn't allowed on a large scale, or ask the user to manually notify the app about updates, which is painful. See this thread on Dropbox forum for details http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=20226&replies=45 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=20226&replies=45 Joe's, Marco's, and mine solutions basically avoid the last part and let me just write.