6 ms·

Blogging Like a Hacker

55 points by mojombo 18y ago

spydez 18y ago
Very nice. It looks surprisingly close to the blog system I had stewing in my brain. But hey... now I can just hack at your's. Only thing you're missing is comments, but perhaps that's what HN is for... Now I just have to learn Ruby.
- mojombo 18y ago
  I've opted to rely on HN for discussion in lieu of comments, but you could easily hook up disqus or another embedded commenting system. Send me a pull request on GitHub when you've got your features hacked in!
  - Shamiq 18y ago
    For most articles I choose to read from my RSS, I pull up the corresponding HN page. The discussion here is a lot more fruitful than any I can find on a blog.
  - lbrandy 18y ago
    I almost created the exact same thing when I started my blog. It was a source-controlled (SVN, though) Textile powered static blogging engine. Comments were the reason I ended up looking into wordpress and movable type. I thought heavily about autosubmitting every post to reddit or hacker news and using that as the discussion but that could be constituted as spam (or offtopic). I thought about using one of the out-sourcing services like disqus or JS-KIT. The problem (back then) was they didn't index properly on search engines and it has really really high switching costs. If those two issues have been solved (the search engine one might have been), I'd consider switching to a static engine.
moonpolysoft 18y ago
For the lulz: http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/2f5a0c888c784a9a6f213c38518504a03d90741a http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/2f5a0c888c784a9a... http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/df2fbc653e928624fe99a4b99902b8d8b57781e7 http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/df2fbc653e928624... http://github.com/abhay/fake-tpw/commit/f81f8577111f6e82cdee7886b447d96277df6694 http://github.com/abhay/fake-tpw/commit/f81f8577111f6e82cdee...
scott_s 18y ago
As sites grow, re-generating and re-copying the entire site may get cumbersome and time consuming. An obvious feature is the make-like ability to determine what has changed since the last invocation, and only modify those files. You can accomplish pushing newly generated sites to remote servers without undue copying through rsync, or an approximation of it.
- mojombo 18y ago
  Yeah, there's lots of smarts left to add to Jekyll. Only regenerating modified posts/assets is a big one.
  - scott_s 18y ago
    It might be easier to actually use make instead of reproducing its functionality. This implies that an invocation of jekyll would produce one static page instead of the whole site.
tjpick 18y ago
Programmer writes own website platform. Standard. I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy. Then I put it to the very bottom of my priority list. Emacs muse-mode + darcs FTW. edit: not to sound like a prick - good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news.
- mojombo 18y ago
  "This guy" would be interested in seeing your blog. I've not seen what Emacs Muse can do and would love to see an example.
- bootload 18y ago
  "... good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news ..." Neat software hacks are always news. I couldn't think of a better place to post your new bits of code.
- qhoxie 18y ago
  I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy. He implements this and open sources it, and yet it is not worth a post on HN to you? What is?
callahad 18y ago
You may also be interested in: * chronicle blog compiler: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/ http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/ * ikiwiki wiki / bliki compiler: http://ikiwiki.info/ http://ikiwiki.info/ I find ikiwiki particularly interesting in that it coordinates with a local vcs (git, hg, svn, etc) to handle revisions and history.
1gor 18y ago
Another good static site generator is http://webby.rubyforge.org http://webby.rubyforge.org It features support for LaTex, markdown, textile filters, autobuild, publishing only changed pages etc. Very small and clean. 'gem install webby' is all needed to get you started.
- jamesbritt 18y ago
  Webby rocks. I'm all for people scratching an itch and rolling their own, but I'm curious why Webby wasn't suitable for the task. In fact, this: http://github.com/mojombo/tpw/tree/master/index.html http://github.com/mojombo/tpw/tree/master/index.html looks exactly like what Webby does.
  - mojombo 18y ago
    Webby is a great system and very close to what I needed; indeed I took many ideas from it. But webby does not help me with the blog specific parts that I wanted to have automated. The entire point of Jekyll is to remove every last bit of pain associated with creating, maintaining, and posting to my weblog.
    - jamesbritt 18y ago
      Webby has a blog mode, though I've not used it, but I'm guessing it wasn't quite what you needed. When I see people sort-of reinvent a wheel or two I wonder what the reason was. Out of curiosity, did you consider forking Webby, or offering to add in the parts you wanted back to the Webby project? Is it easier to grab the ideas you like and start fresh on your own than to try to hack on someone else's existing code? For myself, when I find myself writing something similar to an existing project, it tends to be because a) I wasn't quite aware of what the other project offered, b) (more often) the 80/80 rule kicks in: The existing code gives me 80% of what I want, but I'll be spending 80% of my development time trying to get the rest of what I need, and writing my own version looks to be more efficient in the long run. This is more so if I expect to be reusing that code for many projects, so I can readily see the motivation in creating your own blogging software if you plan on using the hell out of it, regardless of what existing tools do.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
apgwoz 18y ago
I enjoy his writing, and enjoy reading about ideas for generating sites, but I'll use my own blog compiler, thanks.
jfornear 18y ago
On the topic of blogs and CMS... Does anyone else think that Wordpress is getting too complex with all the added features due to it being open source? I feel like people like my dad, who would be happy with a very straightforward and simple-to-use interface without all the added features, are turned off by the complexity of Wordpress. I think a very lightweight CMS that would basically be a password protected AJAX textarea that could easily be embeded into any template would be ideal. No back-end interface or complex editing tools.
- mojombo 18y ago
  It seems almost inevitable that software projects become more complicated over time. Unless simplicity is a core requirement, complex features are constantly added to popular software (and rarely removed). By trying to solve a wide variety of problems, the number of options and screens must correspondingly increase. I'm really impressed by new approaches like Posterous that challenge the way blogging has been done in the past. It's these kinds of approaches that can lead to software that can be either as simple or as complex as the user needs them to be.
  - jfornear 18y ago
    I agree, Posterous is awesome. It would be even more awesome if you could somehow just embed a little code on your own template in order to display your blog on your own design. As far as I know, you currently have to learn the platform (Wordpress, MovableType, etc) in order to make a custom design. I feel like there needs to be a way to have the blog fit into the design without having to code your own CMS.
    - mojombo 18y ago
      They haven't been around very long, I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a slick way to address those problems in the future. I'll be interested to see how they approach it if they do.
    - rantfoil 18y ago
      Thanks for the support, guys. This is a great idea and definitely something we want to get to.
raganwald 18y ago
I was sorely tempted to follow the same path. But then I had an insight: github may be a terrible blog platform, but it is _good enough_ by itself. So far, it sucks not having full text RSS feeds and having to manually tag posts in delicious. It's slow and some readers seem to miss the comments. But a Tom says, you get to write in textile or markdown. And as for not having CSS, I have convinced mself it's a benefit; I am not spending any time tweaking page layout. http://tinyurl.com/homoiconic http://tinyurl.com/homoiconic
jaytee_clone 18y ago
Tom, that was very inspiring. Coincidentally, I decided to roll my own blog a week ago. It's written in Lisp. http://jamrides.com/blog/s/20081114004158.html http://jamrides.com/blog/s/20081114004158.html
- catch404 18y ago
  I enjoyed reading your blog, I especially liked the "And nothing big starts big". quote in your about page. Intersting startup too!
catch404 18y ago
On the subject, to the people who have rolled their own similiar blogs: What text formats are you using? Many seem to follow the "title: \n date: \n tags: \n" type style which seems to do the job pretty well (and can be easily parsed). Any other formats worth investigating?
brlewis 18y ago
After I implemented the world's best photo-sharing site using Scheme I discovered it was also a decent blogging platform. See my blogs here: http://friendfeed.com/brlewis?service=blog http://friendfeed.com/brlewis?service=blog

55 points by mojombo 18y ago

Very nice. It looks surprisingly close to the blog system I had stewing in my brain. But hey... now I can just hack at your's. Only thing you're missing is comments, but perhaps that's what HN is for... Now I just have to learn Ruby.

mojombo 18y ago
I've opted to rely on HN for discussion in lieu of comments, but you could easily hook up disqus or another embedded commenting system. Send me a pull request on GitHub when you've got your features hacked in!
- Shamiq 18y ago
  For most articles I choose to read from my RSS, I pull up the corresponding HN page. The discussion here is a lot more fruitful than any I can find on a blog.
- lbrandy 18y ago
  I almost created the exact same thing when I started my blog. It was a source-controlled (SVN, though) Textile powered static blogging engine. Comments were the reason I ended up looking into wordpress and movable type. I thought heavily about autosubmitting every post to reddit or hacker news and using that as the discussion but that could be constituted as spam (or offtopic). I thought about using one of the out-sourcing services like disqus or JS-KIT. The problem (back then) was they didn't index properly on search engines and it has really really high switching costs. If those two issues have been solved (the search engine one might have been), I'd consider switching to a static engine.

moonpolysoft 18y ago

For the lulz: http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/2f5a0c888c784a9a6f213c38518504a03d90741a http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/2f5a0c888c784a9a... http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/df2fbc653e928624fe99a4b99902b8d8b57781e7 http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/df2fbc653e928624... http://github.com/abhay/fake-tpw/commit/f81f8577111f6e82cdee7886b447d96277df6694 http://github.com/abhay/fake-tpw/commit/f81f8577111f6e82cdee...

scott_s 18y ago

As sites grow, re-generating and re-copying the entire site may get cumbersome and time consuming. An obvious feature is the make-like ability to determine what has changed since the last invocation, and only modify those files. You can accomplish pushing newly generated sites to remote servers without undue copying through rsync, or an approximation of it.

mojombo 18y ago
Yeah, there's lots of smarts left to add to Jekyll. Only regenerating modified posts/assets is a big one.
- scott_s 18y ago
  It might be easier to actually use make instead of reproducing its functionality. This implies that an invocation of jekyll would produce one static page instead of the whole site.

tjpick 18y ago

Programmer writes own website platform. Standard. I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy. Then I put it to the very bottom of my priority list. Emacs muse-mode + darcs FTW. edit: not to sound like a prick - good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news.

mojombo 18y ago
"This guy" would be interested in seeing your blog. I've not seen what Emacs Muse can do and would love to see an example.
bootload 18y ago
"... good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news ..." Neat software hacks are always news. I couldn't think of a better place to post your new bits of code.
qhoxie 18y ago
I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy. He implements this and open sources it, and yet it is not worth a post on HN to you? What is?

callahad 18y ago

You may also be interested in: * chronicle blog compiler: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/ http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/ * ikiwiki wiki / bliki compiler: http://ikiwiki.info/ http://ikiwiki.info/ I find ikiwiki particularly interesting in that it coordinates with a local vcs (git, hg, svn, etc) to handle revisions and history.

1gor 18y ago

Another good static site generator is http://webby.rubyforge.org http://webby.rubyforge.org It features support for LaTex, markdown, textile filters, autobuild, publishing only changed pages etc. Very small and clean. 'gem install webby' is all needed to get you started.

jamesbritt 18y ago
Webby rocks. I'm all for people scratching an itch and rolling their own, but I'm curious why Webby wasn't suitable for the task. In fact, this: http://github.com/mojombo/tpw/tree/master/index.html http://github.com/mojombo/tpw/tree/master/index.html looks exactly like what Webby does.
- mojombo 18y ago
  Webby is a great system and very close to what I needed; indeed I took many ideas from it. But webby does not help me with the blog specific parts that I wanted to have automated. The entire point of Jekyll is to remove every last bit of pain associated with creating, maintaining, and posting to my weblog.
  - jamesbritt 18y ago
    Webby has a blog mode, though I've not used it, but I'm guessing it wasn't quite what you needed. When I see people sort-of reinvent a wheel or two I wonder what the reason was. Out of curiosity, did you consider forking Webby, or offering to add in the parts you wanted back to the Webby project? Is it easier to grab the ideas you like and start fresh on your own than to try to hack on someone else's existing code? For myself, when I find myself writing something similar to an existing project, it tends to be because a) I wasn't quite aware of what the other project offered, b) (more often) the 80/80 rule kicks in: The existing code gives me 80% of what I want, but I'll be spending 80% of my development time trying to get the rest of what I need, and writing my own version looks to be more efficient in the long run. This is more so if I expect to be reusing that code for many projects, so I can readily see the motivation in creating your own blogging software if you plan on using the hell out of it, regardless of what existing tools do.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

apgwoz 18y ago

I enjoy his writing, and enjoy reading about ideas for generating sites, but I'll use my own blog compiler, thanks.

jfornear 18y ago

On the topic of blogs and CMS... Does anyone else think that Wordpress is getting too complex with all the added features due to it being open source? I feel like people like my dad, who would be happy with a very straightforward and simple-to-use interface without all the added features, are turned off by the complexity of Wordpress. I think a very lightweight CMS that would basically be a password protected AJAX textarea that could easily be embeded into any template would be ideal. No back-end interface or complex editing tools.

mojombo 18y ago
It seems almost inevitable that software projects become more complicated over time. Unless simplicity is a core requirement, complex features are constantly added to popular software (and rarely removed). By trying to solve a wide variety of problems, the number of options and screens must correspondingly increase. I'm really impressed by new approaches like Posterous that challenge the way blogging has been done in the past. It's these kinds of approaches that can lead to software that can be either as simple or as complex as the user needs them to be.
- jfornear 18y ago
  I agree, Posterous is awesome. It would be even more awesome if you could somehow just embed a little code on your own template in order to display your blog on your own design. As far as I know, you currently have to learn the platform (Wordpress, MovableType, etc) in order to make a custom design. I feel like there needs to be a way to have the blog fit into the design without having to code your own CMS.
  - mojombo 18y ago
    They haven't been around very long, I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a slick way to address those problems in the future. I'll be interested to see how they approach it if they do.
  - rantfoil 18y ago
    Thanks for the support, guys. This is a great idea and definitely something we want to get to.

raganwald 18y ago

I was sorely tempted to follow the same path. But then I had an insight: github may be a terrible blog platform, but it is _good enough_ by itself. So far, it sucks not having full text RSS feeds and having to manually tag posts in delicious. It's slow and some readers seem to miss the comments. But a Tom says, you get to write in textile or markdown. And as for not having CSS, I have convinced mself it's a benefit; I am not spending any time tweaking page layout. http://tinyurl.com/homoiconic http://tinyurl.com/homoiconic

jaytee_clone 18y ago

Tom, that was very inspiring. Coincidentally, I decided to roll my own blog a week ago. It's written in Lisp. http://jamrides.com/blog/s/20081114004158.html http://jamrides.com/blog/s/20081114004158.html

catch404 18y ago
I enjoyed reading your blog, I especially liked the "And nothing big starts big". quote in your about page. Intersting startup too!

catch404 18y ago

On the subject, to the people who have rolled their own similiar blogs: What text formats are you using? Many seem to follow the "title: \n date: \n tags: \n" type style which seems to do the job pretty well (and can be easily parsed). Any other formats worth investigating?

brlewis 18y ago

After I implemented the world's best photo-sharing site using Scheme I discovered it was also a decent blogging platform. See my blogs here: http://friendfeed.com/brlewis?service=blog http://friendfeed.com/brlewis?service=blog