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HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

hubpress.io

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Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#2

Post by sarreph »

Great idea to leverage GitHub pages! Not sure if this has been done before but this is certainly a lucrative SaaS opportunity due to the non-existent marginal cost of creating a GitHub site.

-- IF OP is the author (or the author sees this) Couple of nitpicks about your landing page:

- Syntax / typo: "no server's rent" --> "no server costs to pay" or similar

- Please do your visitors a favour and add controls to your YouTube embed. It might seem 'aesthetically pleasing' to have a sleek video but it's an explanatory film that a user A) might want to full-screen (lots of small text) and B) might want to be skip around in

Would also consider changing 'About Us' to a marketing-style header pushing the product itself (as it's not really an 'About Us' anyway) as well as an explanatory line or two that explains the product properly and succinctly, as icons alone don't really suffice IMO.

Other than that, great concept — and great start!

Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#3

Post by soumyaray »

Genuine question: Is there any attraction of this tool for folks who already know how to use a static site generator (SSG)? I'm guessing most people who understand how to use git could catch onto an SSG overnight.

(I should add that this is an impressive concept and I'm just begging for a reason to use it).

Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#4

Post by delluminatus »

soumyaray wrote: post #3

Genuine question: Is there any attraction of this tool for folks who already know how to use a static site generator (SSG)? I'm guessing most people who understand how to use git could catch onto an SSG overnight. (I should add that this is an impressive concept and I'm just begging for a reason to use it).

Whether or not you use an SSG, I find the biggest hurdle is getting/making a good theme for your blog. It looks like this comes theme-included, which is actually a pretty big deal if you want to get up and running fast.

Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#6

Post by Tobold »

soumyaray wrote: post #3

Genuine question: Is there any attraction of this tool for folks who already know how to use a static site generator (SSG)? I'm guessing most people who understand how to use git could catch onto an SSG overnight. (I should add that this is an impressive concept and I'm just begging for a reason to use it).

If understood this right (I didn't take a close look at the 3MB Javascript), this is SSG running in the browser, from the static site. So you don't have to run anything (except a browser) on your local machine (not even git).

Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#8

Post by WorldMaker »

delluminatus wrote: post #4
soumyaray wrote: post #3

Genuine question: Is there any attraction of this tool for folks who already know how to use a static site generator (SSG)? I'm guessing most people who understand how to use git could catch onto an SSG overnight. (I should add that this is an impressive concept and I'm just begging for a reason to use it).

Whether or not you use an SSG, I find the biggest hurdle is getting/making a good theme for your blog. It looks like this comes theme-included, which is actually a pretty big deal if you want to get up and running fast.

Yeah, Hubpress, Octopress, Jekyll Bootstrap, and at least one other I can't quite recall, are all the idea of having a preconfigured blog theme ready to go instead of having to build one from scratch (or stick with the very plain Jekyll default). They'll sometimes do things like pre-configure useful Jekyll plugins and provide additional scaffolding tools (this used to be a particularly big deal of Octopress, IIRC, for the versions of Jekyll before it added its own scaffolding system).

It's a nice to have to get started quickly when you don't want to custom build a theme or you want someone else to figure out a lot of the basic configuration.

Re: HubPress.io: A web application to build your blog on GitHub

#9

Post by WorldMaker »

krionicle wrote: post #7

Are we aware of any efforts to decentralize git so that blogs made with it can't be silenced at one point of failure?

Well, this is a decent start:

    $ git remote add newbloghost http://somethingnotgithub.com/example/path.to.git
    $ git push --set-upstream newbloghost gh-pages
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