Blot turns a folder into a website

https://blot.im/how

by angrymouse • 3 years ago

581 133 3 years ago

blot.im

arepb• 3 years ago

Longtime fan of Blot and the founder's (David) work.

james-bcn• 3 years ago

A similar thing: http://tiiny.host/

I use them and I'm a big fan.

freetonik2• 3 years ago

It seems a bit different. Blot keeps pulling changes from Dropbox/Google Drive/etc, so you don't have to upload the folder manually.

pazimzadeh• 3 years ago

https://site44.com is kind of similar, except that all files in a given folder do not become public

sodapopcan• 3 years ago

Whoa, “Remove ${HOST}’s banner”. That brings back memories.

freetonik2• 3 years ago

I briefly contributed to Blot (its code is Public Domain [1]). David keeps working on Blot constantly, and it's pretty cool to see the progress changelog with direct mapping to git commits [2].

1. https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot

2. https://blot.im/news

_0vzt2• 3 years ago

Thanks for contributing – Rakhim created the 'questions' forum:

https://blot.im/questions

scoofy• 3 years ago

An interesting idea!

dang• 3 years ago

Related. Others?

Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. It turns a folder into a website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041158 - July 2022 (9 comments)

Blot – a blogging platform with no interface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17314858 - June 2018 (120 comments)

Blot – blogging from a Dropbox folder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10078031 - Aug 2015 (17 comments)

Show HN: Blot, a static blog powered by Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183498 - Aug 2014 (36 comments)

d_philla• 3 years ago

https://spinup.dev is a similar thing I made a few years ago, with free analytics out-of-the-box for each deploy. Syncing changes is a feature I'd like to add, but time is tight for side-projects at the moment.

dangwu• 3 years ago

We've come full circle

thyrox• 3 years ago

If I remember correctly earliest version of Apache also did this (though it used S/FTP instead of dropbox and .html instead of .md)

margalabargala• 3 years ago

Current versions of Apache also do this.

theyinwhy• 3 years ago

So what you are saying is that the web server Apache is able to serve static web content?

otachack• 3 years ago

I laughed, thanks :D

If there's anything to learn about humanity it's that we apply this technique in many ways.

Nition• 3 years ago

Soon we may even be able to put a website into a folder.

samstave• 3 years ago

CTRL+SHIFT+N New Folder/website

EDIt: this is a good thing.

AlienRobot• 3 years ago

The internet is made of tubes. And tubes are made of circles.

2024 is the year of PHP.

anyoneamous• 3 years ago

Well, I'm off to learn about Apache Tomcat so I can be ready for 2025.

8n4vidtmkvmk2• 3 years ago

Jokes on you. I've been using PHP since.... 2001. Shit, that's a long time.

lcof• 3 years ago

Perl CGI is the way to go to get ready for 2026

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Now how do I serve my micro service from here? Just drop in a js, py or rb file :-)

What if I drop in a tf file?

djbusby2• 3 years ago

WTF is "tf"?

rchaud3• 3 years ago

You used to be able to serve websites via a Dropbox of .html files. It supported CSS, JS and everything. At some point after 2015 they turned off that capability .

iamcreasy• 3 years ago

How do projects like this routes traffic? Similar to ngrok?

_hzw• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember scriptogr.am? It was a similar idea, but it's long gone now.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=scriptogr.am

ulrischa• 3 years ago

Would be cool if it could be self hosted

starkparker3• 3 years ago

It's not trivial and mostly undocumented, but not terrible. https://github.com/davidmerfield/blot

marginalia_nu3• 3 years ago

Isn't that literally just a web server?

starkparker3• 3 years ago

Only if the web server transparently converts non-HTML sources (Markdown, Word docs, Google docs, LaTeX, image galleries) into HTML on the fly.

mikae12• 3 years ago

Yes

https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/10417/blot-im/3

nonrandomstring2• 3 years ago

Haven't tried blot, but I discovered that with a basic stylesheet "tree -H" can be super useful.

johnchristopher2• 3 years ago

Show ?

nonrandomstring2• 3 years ago

Just man tree if it's on your system. I used it for temporary jobs, like where I needed to give some students a quick website of a folder of source files. Not much to it.

     -H baseHREF

     Turn on HTML output, including HTTP references. Useful for ftp sites.
     baseHREF gives the base ftp location when using HTML
     output. That is, the local directory may be `/local/ftp/pub', but
     it must be referenced as `ftp://hostname.organization.domain/pub'
     (baseHREF should be `ftp://hostname.organization.domain').
     Hint: don't use ANSI lines with this option, and don't give more
     than one directory in the directory list. If you wish to use
     colors via CSS style-sheet, use the -C option in addition to this
     option to force color output.

     -T title
     Sets the title and H1 header string in HTML output mode.

and that's about it!

starkparker3• 3 years ago

Express application that converts files to HTML with pandoc and serves the results, with a dashboard.

The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.

1: https://github.com/davidmerfield/Blot/blob/39d9583395c190534...

Ringz• 3 years ago

The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.

I had no idea!

low_tech_love• 3 years ago

Interesting, he has links to his inbox in the file…!

ukuina• 3 years ago

Unusual, but not a security risk, I hope?

Thankfully, only the first name of the recipients is listed.

noduerme• 3 years ago

Fascinating as in should have been added to .gitignore?

dgam3• 3 years ago

It's intentionally public. The news page is generated from todo.txt and my git commit messages:

https://blot.im/news

btucker• 3 years ago

This makes me think of the early/mid-2000s & https://blosxom.sourceforge.net. Blosxom had this delightful concept of file extensions as "flavours." For example, you could have a ".rss" flavour that would present that hierarchy of your site as an RSS feed if you added ".rss" to the URL. Brilliant!

vidarh2• 3 years ago

This used to be fairly common. Reddit is another site. A company I worked at.aroind the same time also had .xml, .rss, .atom. .xml would serve up the raw xml our middleware generated, which was normally "rendered" via xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?) server side. It was great for both debugging (you could browse the site in "xml mode") and to provide an API.

I still like the url approach - being able to browse until you have the view you need, and then just copy the URL and change format in order to find the right API call can be very nice. The challenge, of course, is that you need to be very cautious about which urls you guarantee will be stable, or you'll be locked into a site structure you might regret.

djbusby2• 3 years ago

xsl (what can I say to redeem myself for that?)

Why? XSL is awesome even if a little arcane now.

Time makes fools of us all.

manx• 3 years ago

Love the simplicity! Looks like this shouldn't need a server, but instead could just be a static site generator. Am I missing something?

lpointal• 3 years ago

How do you want to serve pages without an http[s] server ?

myself2482• 3 years ago

The next innovation I expect to see on HN is a service that, on a set schedule, gathers articles about a set of topics that you follow, prints them out onto paper, and delivers them to you as a bound volume for easy perusal.

This has a number of advantages for privacy (there's no way for the publishers to know how much time you spent reading each story), offline-first availability (dead-tree is the ultimate), and sharing (you can hand someone the entire volume rather than just a link to it, and they get the whole contents, all offline).

It really sounds like it could be the hot new thing, if only some forward-thinking VC would invest in it.

8n4vidtmkvmk2• 3 years ago

I'm guessing they mean non-static server. I.e. just nginx without node or php or ruby or python should suffice to serve the static files.

aendruk• 3 years ago

Looks to be principally a turnkey service that shelters consumers from the details of web servers and static site generators.

mikae12• 3 years ago

If there only was a Docker image...

pseudosavant• 3 years ago

Cool idea. This is a project I’ve done that feels in a similar vein. https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html

dgam3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Just what I needed!

slashink• 3 years ago

Been a happy customer since 2018! Thank you so much for making it.

Sephr2• 3 years ago

Please 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

lolinder• 3 years ago

To 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.

badsectoracula2• 3 years ago

I 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.

dgam3• 3 years ago

Fair point – I have just added:

https://blot.im/pricing

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

As 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• 3 years ago

This 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

fnord77• 3 years ago

Are table of contents on posts possible?

secondbreakfast• 3 years ago

I used Blot for about 5 years for Second Breakfast. Its ease of use got me started blogging. Very cool app/service, highly recommend.

I had it strung up with RSS to Mailchimp to auto-send new posts to a mailing list. Recently just switched to Ghost to make that more integrated, we'll see how it goes!

muhammadusman• 3 years ago

Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never never heard of this and I’ve been working in web dev for 10+ years. I love this idea and I have some things I want to put out there without much management on my part. This will be perfect

throwaway14356• 3 years ago

if json and xml files become database tables we can get rid of everything else

vsri• 3 years ago

I've been using Blot for years (for two websites), and I can't say enough good things about it. Happy to see it featured here!

LanzVonL• 3 years ago

S-so does Apache?

khobragade3• 3 years ago

Apache only listens to us nerds

ravenstine• 3 years ago

1. Old solution becomes new again

2. Folks clamor that we actually had things right the first time

3. Hype dies down

4. Blog posts complain that the solution "just doesn't scale" and that the complete opposite approach (or some hybrid) is better

5. GOTO 1

mettamage• 3 years ago

GOTO

1. Old solution becomes new again

Points 2 and 3

4. Dijkstra enters the picture with the paper: Go To Statement Considered Harmful [1]

5. Wait, did this ever happen? :’)

I wonder if there’s a modern language practice that extensively uses GOTO

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.p...

withinboredom• 3 years ago

I use goto whenever I have the opportunity, which, sadly, is not that often.

I don't know why people don't like it -- it's essentially an unconditional jump (can replace all while(true);, for example).

galaxyLogic2• 3 years ago

Files and folders whose name starts with an underscore do not become posts or pages. You can link to or embed them in posts.

So you cannot link to "posts"? Only to files whose names starts with underscore?

RistrettoMike2• 3 years ago

You can specify URLs for specific posts/pages via tags in the post/page file & then link to those URLs directly on other pages.

galaxyLogic2• 3 years ago

I see. thanks

algas• 3 years ago

You can link to posts. I imagine this feature is mainly to have images to use in blog posts that do not become standalone pages on their own.

puttycat• 3 years ago

Can someone explain this to us 35+ year olds? What am I missing?

danesparza• 3 years ago

I'm 48 and I get this (although I prefer Hugo and Github pages).

What part is confusing to you? I'm happy to help.

hkon• 3 years ago

It's like if dropbox automatically exposed your files on the web.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

I think you mean when, not if.

The public folder feature was really nice.

Brajeshwar• 3 years ago

Drop had that features. I was warned multiple times when I started hosting my file download away from my website host to Dropbox.

all2• 3 years ago

Basically you provide the app a folder of files and that app transforms the files into web pages and then (maybe?) serves them.

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 years ago

It let's you create a simple web site without writing any HTML. You just provide a folder of files (text, photos) and choose a template, and it'll turn that into a web site for you.

ok123456• 3 years ago

"Static Site Generator as a Service."

rcarmo• 3 years ago

This is pretty much how my website worked back when running Dropbox as a headless service on Linux was “easy” and bloat-free. Glad to see it as a service.

every• 3 years ago

I do a low-tech version[1] of this using tree-1.8.0...

[1] https://every.sdf.org/

killingtime742• 3 years ago

Very creative and retro!

superkuh• 3 years ago

You know what else turns a folder into a website? Installing nginx from your distro repositories. Then every folder beneath the www dir is a website. I'm not joking around. Files in folders is really the best way to make websites.

RistrettoMike2• 3 years ago

I recently migrated my own static Hugo blog onto Blot, and I just about couldn’t be happier with it.

I’m not versed in web development, but Blot’s developer (David) seems to have a great goal in mind & similar enough priorities to what I wanted that it was a great fit. I finally got to set up the photography site I’d been planning, too.

It’s http://ristrettoshots.com/ if anyone was curious what one take on a Blot photo site would look like.

4justinwilliams• 3 years ago

AKA www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts

khobragade3• 3 years ago

I sort of have a bad taste about this project. I'll use proper support channels and won't rant here, but what happened was that my card was being declined trying to sign up. Thought I could self-host on a linode somewhere given the code is in the public domain, but there is no documentation :/

_0vzt2• 3 years ago

Is it possible that you are in India and affected by recurring billing regulations? Email us and we'll get you up and running:

https://blot.im/contact

khobragade3• 3 years ago

Is it possible that you are in India

I am, unfortunately.

Email us and we'll get you up and running

Will do. Thank you very much!

eternityforest• 3 years ago

How does this compare to Zrok's integrated server? I've been very impressed with zrok even though I haven't done anything with it in production yet.

dovholuknf• 3 years ago

It might be more similar to zrok's caddy integration where you can get "fancier" than just delivering files? Blot is trying to do different stuff than zrok is it seems. Like, it's processing markdown, zrok doesn't try to do that for example. zrok is more about sharing easily. blot doesn't appear to be open source from what i can tell and it's not self-hostable as far as I can tell. seems pretty different overall. I'm not exactly sure what blot is trying to do/be.

Piraty• 3 years ago

caddy can serve markdown'ish files: https://caddy.community/t/markdown-support-in-v2/6984/8

michaelquigley• 3 years ago

I'm the lead developer of zrok. I've also had a habit of building static site generators over the years. Might be an interesting little crossover possibility.

There's a bunch of zrok stuff in the pipeline that's way more important to get to first... but maybe down the line we can support some kind of extension mechanism in zrok and static site generators could just sort of snap right in...

Stuff to think about anyway.

janandonly• 3 years ago

I’ve been a happy blot user for a while now.

Thanks for building this.

Also, my website is https://independentlypoor.com/

sunnybeetroot• 3 years ago

On an iPhone 14 Pro your nav bar covers the content btw https://i.imgur.com/8OZTys7.png

revskill• 3 years ago

How about dynamic data from remote db ?

seper8• 3 years ago

if only this website didnt autoplay

mxsjoberg• 3 years ago

I built something similar - https://github.com/mxsjoberg/md2website

jxdxbx• 3 years ago

I love this service. Happy customer!

iamthepieman• 3 years ago

Is there an option to pay and to self host? Recently my boss asked me for things to spend money on to use up some budget at the end of the year. We can't use hosting services but would pay for support or an "enterprise" edition if we could host it ourselves. Probably not your market but just something to consider.

killingtime742• 3 years ago

Maybe buy the hosted service (to pay them), don't use it, then just use the Open Source?

MahmoudAhmad12• 3 years ago

Props to _0vzt for keeping Blot rocking for a decade - it's like they've got a secret sauce for static site magic. And yeah, Sephr's right about needing clearer pricing. It's like playing hide and seek with numbers! Lastly, devjab's take on pricing clarity is spot on. It's a breath of fresh air when you don't have to turn into a detective to figure out what something costs.

harzach• 3 years ago

I’ve been using blot for YEARS and there’s a huge segment of people in the ttrpg world who have followed suit after being burned by so many platforms. Dev has been super helpful and responsive. Will be a customer for life.

Blot turns a folder into a website

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