symkat

I've been working on https://blogdb.org/ recently.

I originally made it a couple of years ago as a small proof of concept. A couple of weeks ago I started it over and have been using it as a project to work with Claude and learn approaches to coding with AI.

It's been a lot of fun.

Thank you for saying so!

That's super awesome too, this is not so different under the hood, I used libxml for getting the content and pandoc for converting -- pandoc turned out to be by far the best of the tools I tried for that aspect.

It won't necessarily keep the URLs stable, they'll be made based on the title of the post.

That's a cool solution for the ?p=<id> issues, this doesn't handle it but when I've done it for for sites I host I usually use nginx's rewrite rules. I think for query rewriting you need to additionally use the map directive, but I was only handling directory vs .html and things like that.

Thank you again for commenting, I like your site!

Thank you for commenting!

It does put your files into a Hugo directory structure and includes the smol theme. It doesn't recreate your theme, plugins, or process your images, but I also have tried to be very explicit that it just converts your pages and posts and is the starting point for a conversion.

When you put an export file through it, you'll end up on this page: https://imgur.com/a/UUMB6ve where you can download a zip or tgz of the site and you'll clearly understand what you're getting before you can choose if you want to have the remaining pages/posts converted.

I totally agree. This came about because of a pretty expensive quote the person I was talking to got.

Thank you for commenting!

Really the reason I picked Hugo is because that's what the person I was talking to wanted. He'd only found contractors who would charge more than he wanted to pay to do a manual conversion, and said even something that just got his pages and posts over would be worthwhile to him.

I have more experience with Jekyll. In fact, I had tried to start a hosted platform with a CMS for it that I opened sourced a while back (https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog) but it never really got traction.

At this point I'm actively looking for a new job and figured getting this on Hacker News might be helpful for that.

I hadn't heard of Astro before, it looks neat!

In my case, at least a big part of it is I'm looking for a job again and doing something like this to get myself out there, I already had one person who was interested in this specific type of conversion so maybe there are others.

Thanks for the 413 note! I've just upped the client_max_body_size if you want to give it a try again.

It does not, it converts just the blog posts and pages to help you get started on a conversion. It gives you the smol theme by default and the page that gives you access to the downloads gives additional information for finding themes at https://themes.gohugo.io/

You're right, Hugo is for static sites! Hugo does support comments through things like Disqus (https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/).

My service only converts the blog posts and pages themself and helps you get started on a conversion.

I’ve been working on building a web hosting platform.

https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog - It’s centered around hosting Jekyll blogs. It supports having paid user accounts (Stripe), building sites (uses podman containers), deploying built sites to web servers, obtaining SSL certificates for the sites it hosts.

It’s been really fun to work on.

Thanks!

GitHub Pages is a closed source hosting platform. MyJekyllBlog is open source and MIT licensed.

As far as I’m aware, you cannot spin up your own version of GitHub Pages to host things for yourself and offer those hosting services to others. MyJekyllBlog encourages this and has a guide (https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog#installation-guide) for setting it up yourself.

Hi HN,

I’m very excited to show you MyJekyllBlog, a blog hosting platform I have been working on.

Two months ago I shared the GitHub link for the project, and since then I have introduced free demo accounts so you can try it out, improved the templates offered, and introduced import/export functionality so that you can download or upload a tgz of the Jekyll site. The development process is written about on https://tech.myjekyllblog.com/

Thanks, I’m really glad you like it! It’s been a lot of fun to work on.

It does use a few different IPs/servers, and I think some could be combined. If you do end up moving towards replacing yours with this, I’ve got an article written with more information on setting it up for doing development: https://tech.myjekyllblog.com/2022/12/14/setting-up-a-develo...

Thanks again, I appreciate your feedback!

Those are good points, thank you for the feedback and well-wishes!

Hi Hacker News,

I want to show you something I’ve been working on: MyJekyllBlog.

It’s a multi-user CMS and hosting platform for Jekyll blogs. There is a web application that users can register on, and from that web app they can create Jekyll blogs, manage posts and media. When they make those updates, their blog is rebuilt with the Jekyll and the site is deployed to web servers.

The installation process is codified into the included ansible/ directory and instructions are included in the README for installation. So far I’ve been the only one working on it or installing it, so there is bound to be bugs and things I’ve missed, please feel free to open issues against the repository if you run into anything.

It supports three different user registration modes: open where anyone can sign up for an account, invite where anyone with an invite code can sign up for an account, and stripe where users must use a credit card to subscribe immediately after signing up for an account before they can access the site. You can enable more than one registration mode.

The entire system is open source and MIT licensed, including the installation process, devops tools, and billing code.

Thank you for taking a look!

There is also a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqcbSr8sJ8

where are the individual owns the car

You're right -- the city required that taxi cars had medallions to be allowed to pick up passengers, and the one who owned the medallions on cars there was the owner. With a medallioned car you could pick people up in front of bars, night clubs, off a random street corner, etc.

I don't, however see it as any different from an LLC. At the end of the day the taxi drivers worked directly for themselves, had their own clients, optimized for themselves on finding places to get hailed customers. At least the one I talked to about money stuff had their own CPA, if they filed as self-employed or formed an LLC/C-Corp/S-Corp, I don't know. They were paid by people they picked up, directly, rather than the taxi company.

They had a B2B relationship with the taxi stand, they rented a car with a medallion rather than go through the process and cost of buying one, they earned money directly from the people they picked up, making themselves a B2C.

And if you bought a medallion, you didn't need to rent the car from the taxi stand, so you could do it totally yourself and cut them out. You gain maintaining the car, the capital expense of the medallion.

I believe this is the model for taxis -- at least it was about 20 years ago when I worked as a taxi dispatcher in a small town for a short time.

Drivers rented taxis, and the taxi company only made money based on renting out the fleet of cars. It was something like $80 for 12 hours.

Drivers were independent and made money from the customers directly. The drivers I talked to most were a husband/wife pair who rented the same taxi and they told me about having a CPA that wrote off basically everything. Haircuts, clothes, the majority of what they bought was written off their taxes because it was for business.

The dispatcher (what I did) answered the phone and got an origin/destination/name, and radioed drivers until one of them accepted it.

I think the whole operation was a couple dozen cars, a tiny rented building, 3-person rotation of dispatchers, a general manager, mechanic, and an owner.

I suppose it really depends on your perspective. It has pure static hosting, in that anything in the public directory is directly served, so static sites that are built with pre-processing have no at-serve-time processing other than the normal web server block.

For files in site/ that end in .md it does do rendering at the point of serving in some situations. Once it does, it both serves the file and spits out an .html file to serve for the next request. The way I thought about it is that the first request for the file generates it — like a mini hugo build or Jekyll build command running for just one path, and only running after a request has been made to it. This makes the compilation of the HTML just in time and saves processing for files that may never be rendered.

It does have draw backs, and could prove not to be the best path, and perhaps the preprocessing isn’t that big of a deal.

Hi! Yes, absolutely. This was supported initially but not communicated well. I hope the updates more clearly explain that.

The use for plain HTML is documented here: https://docs.markdownsite.com/static-site/

I hope this is helpful, thanks!

Hi HN!

Last week I showed you the open source hosting platform I am working on, and got a lot of great comments and feedback.

There was some confusing over exactly what MarkdownSite is, and I made a lot of updates to the site and added a documentation system and blog to more effectively communicate this.

There was also a few issues with things not working out quite as intended with path resolution. A lot of folks who tried to build websites got 404 errors. This has been better addressed now, as well as a bunch of other fixes over the last week.

This blog post intends to make it easy for someone to build their own hosting platform with MarkdownSite. I hope someone finds it useful :)

I have had some success with letting myself be bored. In similar situations, taking that time to lay down on the floor in a random room in the house and look at the ceiling and admit I’m bored. Some idea or fun thing invariably occurs to me eventually.

Random things that could fill this if you’re looking for more hands-on type of things is wood or metal work, designing and building something physical. Bicycle, roller blade and focusing on improving some aspect of it, or walking around outside intentionally observing your surroundings and seeing what you can learn from them. Music, very good keyboards/digital pianos can be had with headphones. Language (verbal/written) learning. Hope this helps!

I've been working on https://markdownsite.com/ - the "Git Repo -> Website" type of hosting platform, and have completely opened sourced it so others can run it themself.

The installation and on-going configuration management are first class things, with documentation and graphs: https://github.com/symkat/MarkdownSite/tree/master/devops

Thank you!

That’s definitely something I want to explore. I saw this[0][1] a while ago and think a setup with it could work out well, but I haven’t tested any of it yet. If you do, definitely let me know if it works out.

[0] https://www.netlifycms.org/ [1] https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms

Hi!

I think what happened is you clicked “Build My Site!” without entering a git repository in the text input field.

Right now building sites isn’t private, and there is no authentication, so you could iterate the id numbers, and you could see build logs and from those pages. If a git repository has been used before, instead of building a new website, it brings you to the status panel to rebuild it and it is rebuilt on the same sub domain. That specific one — id 9, looks to be the first time someone clicked the build button without entering any repository, anyone else who does that would be redirected to that page.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback!

There is some support in there for build-time changing of things. A file, .markdownsite.yml, can be read in and do things like change where the directory containing markdown files, or the webroot is, and will switch branches. Definitely a place that could be expanded — if you take a look at Manager/lib/MarkdownSite/Manager/Plugin/Maker.pm you’ll see how it builds. So maybe some of that can fit in, and alternative builders are certainly something to think about.

As far as git hooks, right now, you could add one to make your site import with the following:

A githook could trigger an import with curl, for example:

curl -XPOST -d'repo=git@github.com:symkat/mds-example.markdownsite.net.git' https://markdownsite.com/import

The first run will make the site and assign a domain, subsequent runs update the same domain.

Thanks for checking it out and your feedback, definitionally given me some things to think about!

HI! Thanks for the question!

If you’ve used and like GitHub Pages, and are just going to host a website as quickly as possible, it’s probably going to be the better option for you. GitHub can host the website, and GitHub Pages has better documentation and support than MarkdownSite does. MarkdownSite would likely be the bad choice right now for this. It launched literally last night, and I am hoping to get enough traffic and feedback from people playing with it so I can see where I can improve it.

If you want to run your own version of GitHub Pages, and host the website on virtual machines or bare metal servers in a data center, and to then provide that hosting to others, I don’t believe GitHub Pages has any self hosting option that I could see. If that’s true, MarkdownSite would be the better option in that situation.

On a personal note, it is perhaps an incredibly self-indulgent project in that I’ve always simply liked web hosting technology. I want to share that by creating and running a hosting platform myself, and to have the code and documentation and network diagrams out in the open for it so anyone else can run their own too.

I hope this helps explain some of the rational, thanks for checking it out!

Thanks! I would love if this approach took off too. I think it could be pretty good — the friend who runs networking stuff could give people access to hosting and use simple tools, and you get a lot of little hosts! Let me know if there is anything I can do to MarkdownSite to make it easier to host static sites your builder makes. I’ll check out that repo, thank you for the recommendation!

Thanks!

I have some examples on markdownsite.com in the middle, I’ll post them here as well, thank you for asking:

https://github.com/symkat/mds-example.markdownsite.net - A static website made from markdown files

https://github.com/symkat/hugo-example.markdownsite.net - A static website made with Hugo

https://github.com/symkat/os-example.markdownsite.net - A hand-rolled website with HTML/CSS

The websites for each can be seen at their respective domains:

https://mds-example.markdownsite.net/

https://hugo-example.markdownsite.net/

https://os-example.markdownsite.net/

I absolutely want to get the docs more cleaned up and make understanding how to get a site running something effectively communicated. Right now I have this https://markdownsite.com/docs explaining some stuff. Thanks again!

https://modfoss.com/ - a blog by me, a person and a programmer! I don't know about great, but I try :)