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I announced Blot on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. Thank you all for helping to get it started. It was a nice surprise to see it posted again here today. The
by dgam 3y ago
I announced Blot on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. Thank you all for helping to get it started. It was a nice surprise to see it posted again here today.
The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven't heard of static site generators
- anigbrowl 3y agoJust what I needed!
- slashink 3y agoBeen a happy customer since 2018! Thank you so much for making it.
- Sephr 3y agoPlease increase your pricing transparency. I could not easily figure out the price of your hosted service without having to use a search engine. Blot[1] (open source software) turns a folder into a website, and blot.im offers a hosted Blot service for $5/mo. 1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot
- lolinder 3y agoTo be fair, it's very clearly fronted on the Sign Up form, which has a prominent button in the top right corner. A dedicated Pricing page/section would be nice simply because people often look for it, but it's not like they're trying to be sneaky or use dark patterns.
- Sephr 3y agoYeah, this is just a usability issue for sure. Unfortunately for me, I didn't want to click "sign up" until after I could locate the pricing, leading me into a catch-22 situation.
- cortesoft 3y agoDid you think it would sign you up without confirmation or something? It seems strange to me to not want to hit sign up to see how much it would cost.
- hiddencost 3y agoHubSpot popularized collecting emails before providing pricing. A lesson from corporate sales in other industries. (Urgh)
- rchaud 3y agoBut at least they'd offer something, even if it was just tepid whitepaper about CRMs or email marketing.
- badsectoracula 3y agoPersonally it never even occurred to me that the "sign up" button would show pricing - in fact it wasn't even apparent that this was a paid product. Usually services have a separate "pricing" link somewhere at the top that explain things. I pretty much never click on "sign up" buttons unless i have already been convinced the service is something i want to sign up for.
- voidfunc 3y agoI agree sign-up is not how I would look for pricing. Sign-up is something I click when I'm ready to commit to using but until then I'm looking for information and I expect something like a Pricing page. If I can't find the pricing I'm never going to click "sign up"
- EarthAmbassador 3y agoIndeed. In fact, I will refuse to sign up out of spite.
- swells34 3y agoI think of a "sign up" button as something I click after I've chosen to use that product. The button click signals my intent to do so. Having to click it to see pricing is something that would just not happen for me, because I'd never intend to sign up without seeing pricing.
- badsectoracula 3y agoI second this, in fact from the site i didn't even knew this was something you'd pay for or that it was open source.
- dgam 3y agoFair point – I have just added: https://blot.im/pricing https://blot.im/pricing
- devjab 3y agoSome people are pointing out that they found it easy to read your pricing before you added this site. I’d like to offer a different perspective. So many tech products and startups lack this sort of easy to find clarity. Many times in my professional life we’ve dismissed products we might have bought if they had a pricing page as clear as yours. Not so much because they necessarily did anything wrong, but because we rarely have the time to “research” tech products that are “nice” but not “necessary”. So where some companies might have sold us an eternal product license for $5 a month, they didn’t because they didn’t have this sort of pricing page, where they very clearly explain the exact price of their product in as few words as possible. Some may find that ridiculous, but I’m fairly certain that if we do this, then others does as well as we’re very rarely unique. One of the consequences of having done this professionally at many organisations for two decades is that I also do it as a private person. Maybe that’s even more lazy, but it is what it is. So I think you did well to add this!
- wodenokoto 3y agoAs a HN reader it was a little hard to figure out if this was a static site generator or a dynamic script like those old school php files that turned a folder of images into a image gallery website. But for your target audience, it might be confusing to compare your service to those.
- seventhtiger 3y agoThis seems like a very nice product. I wanted to look into the developer guide to customizing a template. It's to add RTL support for Arabic content. This give me error tho https://blot.im/developers https://blot.im/developers
- fnord77 3y agoAre table of contents on posts possible?