The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven't heard of static site generators

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://blot.im/pricing

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!

Anyway, it seems that they fixed it because there is a Pricing link in the menu now. Well done.

A common dark pattern is that you need to enter PI to get to the pricing so that they can call spam you forever. (I am not accusing the linked site of doing it, I haven't checked.)

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.

If I can't find the pricing I'm never going to click "sign up"

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

But for your target audience, it might be confusing to compare your service to those.

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)

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

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

https://blot.im/news

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

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.

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.

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

Time makes fools of us all.

It's doable. It's also a massive pain.

The big problem was that the easy way out is that your XML ends up being changed to be "XSL-friendly", which means a ton of concessions that effectively encodes knowledge of the expected presentation no matter how much you want to keep it largely semantic.

Small presentation changes far too often result in changes to the XML to accommodate weaknesses in XSL.

I still like the idea. But not the use of XSL to achieve it. Unfortunately, we don't have any great alternatives that aren't horrible in all kinds of different ways.

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

2. https://blot.im/news

https://blot.im/questions

EDIt: this is a good thing.

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

What if I drop in a tf file?

2024 is the year of PHP.

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

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...

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

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

     -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.

But even so I didn't check out `-H`, I thought it was just the help flag and immediately thought the comment was a bit lacking, my bad.

I use them and I'm a big fan.

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!

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

The public folder feature was really nice.

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.

The crux being that it's personalized. It could use my Pocket, RSS reader, reddit/hn voting habits, even my bookmarks db as inspiration. I don't know or care, as long as it manages to deliver me a week's worth every week. Filled with content that I'm going to like 90% of the time, i'd love it and pay for it. I'd even accept ads every few pages.

What I envisioned, is truly slow paced. Like the "old" in depth weekly magazines. Or journals. Something that I have a week to go through, and that doesn't get stale if I don't.

Maybe I should make it myself (though I guess that's my impulsive ADD brain tricking me into yet another hare chase)

You joke, but this would be great, and something that every digital solution has failed at replicating so far.

The best we have are newsletters (each from a different site/author) which clutter up my inbox and make me not want to read them. A printed weekly digest of everything (preferably with the comment threads included) would be a great way to spend a weekend.

Hint: Using a public (book) library also means your reading behavior is tracked by intelligence agencies, unfortunately, so you need to own the books you may want to read.

Although it needs the context to really appreciate the funny.

Thanks for building this.

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

https://blot.im/contact

I am, unfortunately.

> Email us and we'll get you up and running

Will do. Thank you very much!

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.

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

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

That function really seems like it should be in the browser anyway. The server serves, the renderer renders.

https://nginx-extras.getpagespeed.com/modules/markdown/

Like they'd even spawn arbitary processes for you (w/ CGI).