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Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

markdownsites.com

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Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#21

Post by hanniabu »

kristerv wrote: post #11
xchaotic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some overlap with Jekyll. Personally, Jekyll works better for me atm, as it produces static content, can be hosted for free on github or cheaply on s3 and has a bigger community and backing of github engineering. So perhaps, it's worthwhile to try and figure out jekyll-lite or something like that? For me setting up jekyll was a pain, I had to get ruby, rubygems, jekyll itself and then a manual config…

yeah Jekyll is really good for what it does. I think markdownsites offers something that jekyll doesn't - almost non-existent setup worries. Also one of my goals is that my non-coder friends could get their websites up with little effort. So Jekyll is great, but for IT savvy people.

It'd be cool to make use of their current templates and input the content in for them then. I have never actually used Jekyll though so I don't know if my understanding translates to practicality or even makes any sense.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#22

Post by tammer »

There's no greater metaphor for the detachment of the tech-elite from the average user than the pervasiveness of Markdown. Its a poor answer to a problem that exists solely because of lack of coordination among the very tech-elite who rely on MD.

An open spec for efficient binary encoding of formatted text is the thing we've needed for 20 years - not more MD tools.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#23

Post by daviddumenil »

wodenokoto wrote: post #18

Coming from wordpress to a website that uses markdown for posts I have run into a few problems or inconvenience that I haven't seen addressed. There's a lot of boiler-plate in markdown posts. Author, date, etc. Wordpress does all this for you. My editor doesn't know which categories, authors or tags already exists. I can't remember if I use the category "car" or "cars". I haven't found a nice way of handling inline i…

That's interesting in that it suggests why more blogs don't follow Daring Fireball's style.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#24

Post by scrollaway »

fredley wrote: post #8
xchaotic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some overlap with Jekyll. Personally, Jekyll works better for me atm, as it produces static content, can be hosted for free on github or cheaply on s3 and has a bigger community and backing of github engineering. So perhaps, it's worthwhile to try and figure out jekyll-lite or something like that? For me setting up jekyll was a pain, I had to get ruby, rubygems, jekyll itself and then a manual config…

I've been working on a Jekyll-like system for fun over the past couple of weeks. I've tried to make it as painless to install as possible, but it does require Python 3. https://github.com/fredley/mirage Was planning on doing a Show HN if/when I'd made it a bit more robust. It makes sites that look like this: http://mirage.mamota.net

Do you cater only to blogs or to static website in general? I tried both Hugo and pelican but neither really supported general purpose websites.

For example, https://hearthstonejson.com uses Jekyll and I haven't been able to move it.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#26

Post by gkya »

tammer wrote: post #22

There's no greater metaphor for the detachment of the tech-elite from the average user than the pervasiveness of Markdown. Its a poor answer to a problem that exists solely because of lack of coordination among the very tech-elite who rely on MD. An open spec for efficient binary encoding of formatted text is the thing we've needed for 20 years - not more MD tools.

Nobody wants another binary encoding, and there's HTML already.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#27

Post by iamdave »

ryanSrich wrote: post #20
wodenokoto wrote: post #18

Coming from wordpress to a website that uses markdown for posts I have run into a few problems or inconvenience that I haven't seen addressed. There's a lot of boiler-plate in markdown posts. Author, date, etc. Wordpress does all this for you. My editor doesn't know which categories, authors or tags already exists. I can't remember if I use the category "car" or "cars". I haven't found a nice way of handling inline i…

That's not a markdown problem. Its a consequence of using markdown within a framework, generator, etc that uses frontmatter or an equivalent to define meta data. Several frameworks and tools allow for markdown and static site rendering that also support an admin UI where one can define this data more easily.

also support an admin UI where one can define this data more easily.

I'm looking for one such or a couple, can you enumerate?

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#28

Post by desireco42 »

tammer wrote: post #22

There's no greater metaphor for the detachment of the tech-elite from the average user than the pervasiveness of Markdown. Its a poor answer to a problem that exists solely because of lack of coordination among the very tech-elite who rely on MD. An open spec for efficient binary encoding of formatted text is the thing we've needed for 20 years - not more MD tools.

I in general share your sentiment about standardization and fidelity of tools.

I disagree on this completely, here is why:

It is simple format and users can figure it out and it will empower them. Some will know very basic things, but others can learn and do more.

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#29

Post by jplahn »

tammer wrote: post #22

There's no greater metaphor for the detachment of the tech-elite from the average user than the pervasiveness of Markdown. Its a poor answer to a problem that exists solely because of lack of coordination among the very tech-elite who rely on MD. An open spec for efficient binary encoding of formatted text is the thing we've needed for 20 years - not more MD tools.

I have two questions: 1) What's the problem that's being solved? 2) And what's a good answer?

I'm genuinely curious because I've never considered Markdown anything more than a way to more easily render text -- which it seems to do fine. But, maybe I've just exposed myself as an average user..

Re: Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes

#30

Post by arikr »

This is excellent. There has been a lack of tools to solve this exact problem - wanting to get a basic site up very quickly and cheaply.

Previously the best alternative was a free Firebase/Google account, and then setting up a HTML/CSS site, and deploying it.

This is much faster.

Thank you for building it!

And please, don't be dissuaded by the other commenters. Sure, the market is much smaller than the market that Squarespace et al are targeting, but you're solving your own problem, and there are at least a few others that share that same problem!

Problem this solves: People who want to quickly register a domain and get a text landing page up.

Side note: I wish Medium.com could set up a specific blog post as the home page for a publication with a custom domain

Or I wish I could get a custom domain for Quip.com notes

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