Void – A website creation tool

by josephernest • 11 years ago

59 63 11 years ago

bikamonki2• 11 years ago

Yessss! Except I get heartburn when I eat PHP :) Maybe I can port the 100 LOC to JS and try a node version! Code flavor aside, your logic is right on point: for 99,99% sites out there* a CMS like WP is like using an 18-wheeler to go do grocery! Why did that happen? My only explanation is that The Home Depot is behind this whole DYI website non-sense...

* Yeah, I made that stat up.

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Yes exactly :) I was fed up about using an 18-wheeler for each small project-website I had to set up ;)

If you like stats in the same fashion as yours: http://www.thisisvoid.org/article/04 ;)

bikamonki2• 11 years ago

My solution is called Statico: a json file with all the site content and front-end magic to display it. A locally run software allows me to edit the pages, upload images to S3 and update the json file. The additional advantage in my opinion: no server. All hosted on S3 :)

dheera5• 11 years ago

As much as I too hate PHP is as a programming language, I'd say it's fine for this though, where it's being used effectively as a more powerful version of server-side includes.

Python/Ruby/Java/node are all awesome to develop on at first (and have excellent development servers) but all PITAs to production-deploy thanks to poor documentation/tutorials, lack of any kind of project cooperation from the major production HTTP servers, and lack of shared hosting services that have built infrastructure to support these.

PHP is easy to production deploy. Drop .php files into /var/www/html. This is unfortunately what keeps PHP going, because newbies like the simplicity of deployment.

blumkvist2• 11 years ago

You can deploy node on IIS.

falcolas2• 11 years ago

To be fair, if you're using a web server other than Apache, PHP involves an equal amount of pain.

vdaniuk3• 11 years ago

Python/Ruby/Java/node ... all PITAs to production-deploy thanks to poor documentation/tutorials

I don't get it. I am not a professional programmer or devops and I was able to deploy multiple servers for ruby(rails on webrick, puma and unicorn) and node apps without any significant problems. Over time, I used do/linode prebuilt images, stock ubuntu server, docker containers with and without nginx and did not spend much time or effort in any configuration.

There are multiple easy "git push" heroku-like paas alternatives, docker is available on most popular iaas platforms.

Can you elaborate what exactly cooperation from http servers do you need to deploy ruby/python?

jekrb• 11 years ago

http.createServer(...

Easier than /var/www/, in my opinion.

noir_lord2• 11 years ago

I did something very similar a while back except in python more as a PoC but ended up using it - http://benlowery.co.uk/blog/statomatic.html

Mine supports arbitrarily nested pages, customisable templates, metadata in YAML at the top of the file and automatic ToC etc.

Largely thanks to the insanely good PyMarkdown library.

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Waw, looks great too!

noir_lord2• 11 years ago

Thanks, for a really quick hack it's come in surprisingly useful particularly for generating documentation and quick internal sites.

dheera5• 11 years ago

Interesting. I built something almost identical except used JSON for the parameters at the top, used plain old HTML for the content and did all the beautifying with CSS, and powered it with Python+Flask instead of PHP.

krat0sprakhar2• 11 years ago

I have nothing against PHP but it would be great if this is built in a language like Go so that anyone can download a static binary without any dependencies.

Kudos for shipping!

primroot• 11 years ago

How about http://gohugo.io/ ?

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Looks nice but when I click "Install" on home page of gohugo.io, I see: "brew install hugo". Another tool that I don't know: "brew", and that I probably cannot install on my shared hosting server.

The point of Void is minimalism: apache+php, nothing else required. < 100 lines of code in a single php file (+ the markdown parser lib of course).

nosefrog• 11 years ago

How far along is hugo? I tried and failed to make the blog I wanted with it and had to hack around its deficiencies. I appreciate the fact that it's a single static binary, but its directory structure is overly complicated and arbitrary things don't work.

dangrossman• 11 years ago

A PHP file has less dependencies than a Go binary. There's over half a billion websites. There are probably under 20 million people in the world who know what a "static binary" is, fewer still who have the knowledge and resources to deploy one on the web. The vast majority of people with websites can use this PHP file as-is, with no additional learning or work -- just FTP it over to any penny host in the world. They'd not be able to do anything useful with a binary file.

amelius• 11 years ago

I respectfully disagree. A PHP file may have lots of dependencies. And worse, these dependencies are mostly hidden. (Think of libraries used from within the PHP file). You can't tell if you have resolved all dependencies until you have fully tested all of the functionalities of a PHP file!

Anyway, since the code takes only 100 lines, this project could very well be written in any number of languages, I suppose.

thefreeman• 11 years ago

And what advantage would that give you? How are you going to run your Go static binary on a shared host without ssh access?

You are literally trying to nitpick on PHP's greatest strength, ease of deployment.

weeksie2• 11 years ago

How does this compare to something like Jekyll?

hobarrera2• 11 years ago

I had the same question.

The answer is awfully:

1) I don't see how it generates static websites. It generates pages on-demand: http://thisisvoid.org/article/05-perf.

2) The documentation is a tribute to it's name: null.

3) PHP (AFAIK) doesn't do nice URLs like "/articles/article-7", so my guess is that there's some additional configuration done to the web server. Ugly (compared to Jekyll's stupid-simple solution to this).

4) You seem to need to fork it in order to use it (rather than being able to install it and use it as you would any other tool).

josephernest11• 11 years ago

I think you miss the point.

You compare :

* Jekyll which is a great tool, with lots of features, but which has at least 50 files & probably 1000s of line of code. It's great but I wouldn't be able to understand 100% of how it works in 2 hours. Impossible. Moreover I cannot install gem (and probably not Jekyll) on my shared hosting. Huh...

* Void, my toy-website-creation-tool (yes, I have no problem with that: it's a toy tool): you can understand 100% of how it works by reading less than 100 lines. Nothing more. You can install it on a shared hosting, only requirement: Apache + PHP.

Yes, you need to open and hack the PHP file of Void to customize. What's the problem with that? It's done on purpose.

Is it mandatory nowadays to use many tools like Brew, Composer, Gem, Symfony, etc. to set up a simple website? (I mixed random names that are required in lots of CMS/static generators I found).

My answer is no: you can do something simple with a "hack it yourself" philosophy. And less of 100 lines of code.

valvar2• 11 years ago

Wow, this is great! I'm switching my WP blog to this immediately.

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Share the URL then! :)

valvar2• 11 years ago

Oh, it's controversial, somewhat edgy, political nonsense, but I might end up using this for some other project as well, and then I'll certainly share the URL :)

hpaavola• 11 years ago

https://github.com/Harri/Spage

It has search, sitemap, comments and moderation etc. but still just a static site generator.

pearjuice• 11 years ago

Having 100 lines of code is not something to be proud of, especially if the lines (3 examples picked arbitrarily) look like this:

    1/ if (count(array_slice(array_reverse(glob("./article/*.txt")), $_GET['start'], 11)) > 10)
    2/ error_reporting(0);
    3/ if (trim(dirname(parse_url($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], PHP_URL_PATH)), '/') === $requestedpage)

Though I really hate to blame the programmer, projects like these is what gives PHP a bad name; "Oh look another undocumented, untested, write-once piece of PHP not confirming to any standards whatsoever!"

pierrec• 11 years ago

"Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception)." [1]

(And neither am I!) See this massive list of static website generators [2], though it, too, probably barely scratches the surface.

My homepage is static and generated in raw PHP. Being originally a templating language, I found it well suited to static generation, even without any framework or tool on top of it. This especially applies if you don't need a lot of "common" features, and have some other specific requirements (in my case, I mainly needed pjax with non-pjax fallback, which keeps the music playing while changing pages - surprisingly badly supported by existing generators).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747651

[2] https://staticsitegenerators.net/

zapt023• 11 years ago

I am pro PHP, but this is honestly an awful display of PHP usage. Templates mixed with logic inside the main php file? Check. Not using Composer for dependency management? Check. Reinventing the wheel when it comes to routing instead of using a battle-tested component like the Symfony Router? Check. Three strikes, you're out!

dewey• 11 years ago

One of it's features is that it's "A single PHP file of less than 100 lines of code." - Adding all these things you listed would just make it more complicated for no good reason. I'm all for sticking to best practises but in that case it'd make no sense. This is supposed to be deployed easily on shared web hosts, installing dependencies wouldn't work there.

zapt023• 11 years ago

Well it could be 5 lines of code. To edit the output you would have to fork the project for no good reason. Templating exists so you don't have to do stuff like that. Regarding dependencies, you can provide a pre-built zip archive with the dependencies installed already. Then it's just a matter of uploading the folder.

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Here is a discussion exactly about "Why mixing templates and logic is not necessarily bad": http://www.thisisvoid.org/article/03

I have a math research background: if you can prove something in 2 pages with no extra tool, it's far better than doing the same by invoking a big difficult Theorem.

Moreover, I am not a profesionnal developer. And for me, installing Apache+PHP is enough. I don't want to add more tools, more layers. The list could be endless: Let's use Symfony, Composer, Brew (random name here, I don't know what is Brew)... and at the end I'll have a big big thing...

I really want to keep it simple...

Each new layer is like "minus 10 points" for my project ;)

zapt023• 11 years ago

hey joseph,

I read your post, and empathize with the notion of "less is more". The problem arises when you want to extend Void. Instead of providing a good way to do so (using templates and a hook system), you force people to code in a single file without structure that quickly becomes a mess. If you never plan to do anything else with Void than what is provided, that's fine, but in my experience website development just doesn't work like that.

benburwell• 11 years ago

Looks a lot like this little thing I made a few years ago: https://github.com/benburwell/MDEngine

ebbv• 11 years ago

C'mon man you hard coded the copyright date? date('Y') is pretty easy. ;)

josephernest11• 11 years ago

Thanks :) I fixed this mistake: https://github.com/josephernest/void/commit/43623c00c1c7264e...

ahunt09• 11 years ago

If the OP is claiming copyright they only need to claim the year of original publication. Technically, not even that. To print the copyright as the current year doesn't make sense. Unless: - The copyright is on specific content, made in the year indicated. - The content is substantially revised (should just add a year, not replace it.).

For the entire website as an entity, 2015 is fine as the copyright notice and original date of publication.

That's my understanding anyway. Not legal advice.

sparaker• 11 years ago

No demo, no screens? Atleast have the courtesy to display your work properly.

josephernest11• 11 years ago

No demo? It's in the middle of the page http://thisisvoid.org/ : "Download it now, __see the demo__ website, or browse the code"

hellbanner• 11 years ago

Related - anyone have the link to "the last anonymous hosting service"? If you send him a dollar & a un/pw he would set it up for you. I think "void" was in the URL, too.

tarball• 11 years ago

Similar project, ideal for image-based paginated content: https://github.com/lisezmoi/lightbulb Demo: http://catgifpage.com/

Void – A website creation tool

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