
Show HN: Publish a Markdown website in 5 minutes - kristerv
http://www.markdownsites.com/
======
kyledrake
Congrats on the launch! I had an initial thought of coming up with a site like
this, but decided that providing an open HTML platform was best (hence,
[https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org)). But I'm happy someone finally
scratched the itch.

Random thoughts:

You're going to want to use subdomains for the sites, otherwise all sites are
sharing the same domain security model, and you're going to run into problems
when (not _if_ , _when_ ) a site gets reported for abuse/phishing/spam/ect
issues. Path origin security support is years out.

While you're on subdomains, get a wildcard SSL cert and default to it.
Neocities started without SSL, and next month I'm paying the price for that
sin - we're switching to default SSL and unfortunately it's likely going to
break a lot of sites. It's not really a choice anymore, given the political
climate and the upcoming pagerank dock from Google.

If the site explodes in popularity, I'm happy to give advice. There's a lot of
problems I've solved relating to running a massive web hosting service for a
lot of people. Some of it required months of research and some serious
firehose drinking to figure out.

Lastly, don't be afraid to ask for money - at least $5/mo, if you go lower
you're just crop sharing for the credit card companies. At a bare minimum,
throw up a PayPal donation button. I've learned that if you provide a useful
service, people will pay you, even if there's an excellent free option. I'd
rather pay a small amount to help sustain a service than have it fall apart
from lack of funds and/or dev interest. That's a good thing and it's worth
something.

To illustrate the importance of at least a donation button: HN users donated
over $4000 to us on launch, and I ran the site on that budget for almost two
years. Site possibly wouldn't exist today without HN support. Sometimes the
comment sections betray this (I'm including myself in this statistic), but
kind hearted, wonderful people lurk here.

Good luck.

~~~
thegeomaster
Sorry for the off-topic, but I have to share:

A year and a half ago, I was looking for a place that would allow me to host a
single HTML page for free. A couple of shady free hosting sites later, I came
across Neocities. It was a breeze to set up an account there and host a short
story of mine in HTML format.

I found myself giving out the link to anyone who'd like to check it out,
without needing to e-mail them a PDF (or even worse, a Word document). I like
nice typography and readability so sending a simple text file was not the
ideal option either. But a link to a page was perfect: it displays well on
every device and the page can easily be updated. I wrote the whole thing in
Markdown and hacked together a short script to generate HTML from it, which I
could easily drag-n-drop to Neocities for quick iteration based on remote
people's feedback.

I never wrote again, but if I did, I'd definitely use the same method. An open
platform for HTML publishing is essential to keeping the spirit of the
minimalist, hyperlink-driven Web alive.

So thank you for Neocities, and cheers!

------
agentgt
My major critique is that the generated sites are needlessly javascript
powered. Right when I saw the "Loading" I thought oh no how many assets are
going to be downloaded... for just markdown content.

I guess I'm just an old web 1.0 guy but I just don't see and understand why
everything must be done in a super dynamic way. Hell sometimes I like clicking
on a link and watching the browser do the loading as it is confirmation for me
the thing actually got loaded. Particularly when buying/shopping for stuff (ie
traditional POST).

~~~
paulddraper
Aw...this makes me so sad.

I need to fix my brain. Every time I see "static sites", I think "oh great, no
dynamic server or client code, just static HTML/CSS for fast loading".

If I'm going to have to undergo a "compile step" for my website, it's going to
do something worthwhile, darn it.

~~~
avn2109
I keep waiting for someone to write a program that consumes as input Markdown
text and emits as output a pure HTML/CSS site literally like this
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/)
except with the text from the Markdown file instead of swear words. Maybe it
could even accept several Markdown files and make them into blog posts or
something.

If nobody else does I guess eventually I'll get fed up and build it myself :\

~~~
kornish
Plenty of static site generators, as they're called, exist to do this. Good
jumping-off points would be investigating Jekyll (written in Ruby) and Hugo
(written in Golang).

[https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll)

[https://github.com/spf13/hugo](https://github.com/spf13/hugo)

~~~
avn2109
Yup but they're bloated.

~~~
codethief
I agree. In Hugo's case there wasn't even a way to generate a completely
static website for the longest time (i.e. not a blog or anything like that)
and I'm not even sure they've fixed it yet.

------
kristerv
I have many informational websites like
[http://www.krister.ee](http://www.krister.ee) and sometimes I register
domains on a whim when I get a really good idea for a website. I decided to
create a simple tool to help manage these microsites and in addition to buying
a domain I can immediately fill it with demo-content using markdown.

Before I get into feature creep (hero image, forms, analytics) I'd like to
work on reaching an audience. Problem is, I'm not sure who would appreciate
it. I know it's a useful tool so any tips on how to spread the word is greatly
appreciated.

~~~
notahacker
Your target market is somebody that wants to create _lots_ of minimalist
websites quickly. (those creating one personal website whose priority is
getting things done likely skip the "evaluate best alternatives" step and go
straight to Tumblr/Wordpress or their favourite social network.)

Unfortunately, apart from _polymaths that just want to share their expertise
on as many discrete subjects as possible_ which I'm not convinced is the
biggest target market, it's probably blogspammers and astroturfers...

~~~
frozenport
Also troll websites, for example,
[http://www.makecppgreatagain.com](http://www.makecppgreatagain.com), or
[http://opisaflag.com](http://opisaflag.com)

------
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

~~~
bigge
Sounds like you're looking for something similar to what i just released
today. It's a service called Idnty and let's you create a simple and clean
personal page in no time. No custom domains yet but it's in the pipeline.
Please have a look, [https://idnty.me](https://idnty.me)

~~~
wingerlang
Really cool. I don't want to create an account just to try it out though,
maybe letting users play around until they are satisfied would give a better
sign up conversion rate? (Although the video itself is great).

Just a thought, not sure if good or viable. But maybe let users buy their
designs for self-hosting would be an idea.

~~~
bigge
Thanks for some really good feedback! Your idea about signup after trying it
out is spot on. I will probably implement that straight away. Self-hosting is
interesting as well, never thought of that, but might be an alternative way to
go.

------
RockyMcNuts
Making a modern, responsive, mobile-aware website seems like a huge learning
curve right now.

It would be great if there was a tool that let you use simple markdown, took a
few options, and generated beautiful static pages like e.g. Medium with a
minimum of hassles.

I guess a lot of people use WordPress with themes, or Weebly, SquareSpace but
it still seems pretty complicated.

~~~
ricardobeat
If you want Medium, why not use Medium?

~~~
jhpaul
medium is blog focused, a medium post is a post on your account. this is a
standard single webpage

------
jamesgeck0
Reminds me of Aaron Swartz's Jottit application:
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sweatsmall](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sweatsmall)

~~~
PlugTunin
While Jottit is great and representative of yet another cool thing Aaron
contributed to the world, it occasionally goes down for days, or even weeks at
a time.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Oh, yeah. It's also currently incredibly slow to load for me. I wouldn't
recommend that anyone use it at this point. Just pointing out an example of a
similar service for comparison. It doesn't do much, but the UI has some
serious polish.

~~~
PlugTunin
Current usability aside, like another poster said, thank you for sharing that,
James.

------
sgslo
Awesome project! Anything to get faster deployments out is a great tool.

Hate to be 'that guy', but it would be nice if you served this over HTTPS,
given that you are accepting credit card details.

~~~
kristerv
for sure, top3 issue to work on.

------
Rabidgremlin
If you want to roll your own, I have a Docker image that pulls Markdown out of
git, runs Hugo over it and pushes the site to an S3 bucket. Also works with
Bitbucket pipelines so you can get a site rebuild with a simple git push:
[https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3](https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3)

~~~
Symbiote
Now I feel old.

I have a very small server running Apache, with mod_markdown installed. .md
files are rendered as HTML by Apache, and there's a CSS file to tweak if I
feel like it.

[https://github.com/hamano/apache-mod-
markdown](https://github.com/hamano/apache-mod-markdown)

~~~
Rabidgremlin
That's similar to how I used to do it it but I got tired of paying for
servers.... plus this approach let me play some "buzzword bingo"

BTW my first Internet facing thing was a CGI-BIN Perl script delivering call
records for telcos, way back in 1995. I've been cutting code for 35+ years.
Never feel old!

~~~
Symbiote
I have several almost-zero-traffic sites running from an Odroid (ARM board) at
home. The largest site has only 30k requests in the Apache log for October,
but it's a photo gallery, so there's 150GB of pictures behind it. There's also
a backup of my desktop, which is another 2TB or so.

I set its ancestor up when I was about 16, using Debian -- and invested a fair
amount of time in it, learning a lot.

When I bought it in 2013, the cost of cloud storage for a few years was far
greater than the cost of the board + a hard drive, but setting up the obscure
hardware took more effort than I expected. Nevertheless, I have no plan to
switch to cloud services. I like owning my own stuff, and keeping the
flexibility to add whatever service I need on the network at home is very
useful. For example, I can SSH into it, and control my fancy central heating
system, and a while back I added a UPNP media server, which can stream to a
Chromecast.

~~~
Rabidgremlin
Nice!

------
milge
I run uBlock and got a message saying the site is down. Disabled it and got it
to work.

I think one way to differentiate yourself in this kinda area is making it run
without any backend tech like jekyll, python, etc. Make it run client-side
only. Just my 2 cents.

~~~
kristerv
good point. it's something I myself would also like. I'll have a think about
this.

I'll also have a look at ublock. I also use it, haven't had problems. Maybe
you tried exactly when the site was down. Had overload problems for a few
minutes.

~~~
Yenrabbit
It loaded fine for me, ublock in chrome on Linux. Nifty tool you've made -
thanks for sharing :)

~~~
kristerv
thank you :)

------
fiatjaf
Let me suggest Classless Themes[1][2] and its approach to theming that only
switches a CSS file to transform the same HTML into multiple different themes.
It's ideal for setups like that, where your user want themes, but you can't
allow him to touch the HTML templates.

[1]:
[https://websitesfortrello.github.io/classless/](https://websitesfortrello.github.io/classless/)
[2]:
[https://github.com/websitesfortrello/classless](https://github.com/websitesfortrello/classless)

------
tatotato
I like to make a markdown as well as a site. It's usually different each time,
which keeps things interesting. This isn't a problem for me as the number of
sites I make is limited by the number of domains I have.

------
fiatjaf
I'm interested in that domain part. How can I buy a domain through this thing?
Will it own my domain or will I be able to move the domain and use it for
different things in the future? How?

------
wodenokoto
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 images.

~~~
ryanSrich
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.

~~~
iamdave
_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?

~~~
ryanSrich
Not all of these fit the bill exactly, but they all have their own advantages.

\- prose.io

\- siteleaf.com

\- statamic.com

\- getkirby.com

\- github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin

\- github.com/netlify/netlify-cms

\- federalist.18f.gov

You can also always build your own on top of whatever generator you want to
use (example: [http://willschenk.com/building-a-gui-for-managing-
middleman-...](http://willschenk.com/building-a-gui-for-managing-middleman-
blogs/)).

My favorite setup though is middleman + contentful + codeship. Static site
generation happens with middleman. Content management happens with Contentful.
Publishing happens with codeship.

------
giarc
FYI - When you check a site, there is a little blue pop up in the bottom right
corner. It is hidden by the green "Online" chat bar.

~~~
kristerv
hmm, i'm not sure what blue popup you're talking about. Can you screenshot
maybe?

~~~
kevincennis
It's the thing that tells you to save before you can check the availability of
a domain

~~~
kristerv
riiiight.. fixed! thanks for the report. pretty nasty bug :)

------
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.

~~~
jplahn
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..

~~~
tammer
1) See here[1] - problem very specifically being solved is lack of readability
of HTML (and HTML being the only open portable spec for formatted text).

2) A good answer is another, more efficient open spec for encoding formatted
text - meaning I can use any app to format my text, then open it in another
app and be sure I have full fidelity. This fidelity would be constrained by a
requirement of HTML output.

[1]:
[https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosop...](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy)

~~~
hayd
Isn't the answer CommonMark?

------
corobo
Why does it flicker "Loading" before it displays the content? Can't something
be cached somewhere to avoid that whenever I click something?

Not displaying any change until it's rendered might make it feel more seamless

------
thenomad
Great idea, but the design would have to be significantly more attractive for
me to use it for most of the things that would immediately spring to mind.

That's a solvable problem, though - grab some top-flight themes with
appropriate licenses and you're probably good to go!

~~~
kristerv
Could you perhaps point out some specific details that you find annoying?

------
sirtimbly
mdwiki is the best take on this idea I've seen:
[http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md](http://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md)

------
ne01
At SunSed we are working on v3 of our CMS.

V3 is very similar (in concept) to what you have built. I believe that there
is huge market for tools designed only for developers.

Like Weebly but for developers.

~~~
kristerv
interesting, i'll keep an eye out for your release. Incredible UI design btw.

~~~
ne01
Thank you! :)

------
devsmt
Beautiful idea, you are heading in a crowded market and at the moment the app
is not too differentiated, I hope you the best.

~~~
gfodor
what other apps are there like this? i've wanted a "splat some markdown to the
internet" app but have never found one.

~~~
TylerE
Github pages?

------
falsedan

      > Extension not supported
    

when trying to add my personal domain. What DNS extension is it trying to use?

------
tantalor
Is any group working on standardizing and implementing native support for
markdown in the browser?

What are the major obstacles?

~~~
Someone1234
What is the value in that?

Markdown has two substantial benefits: Easy to store format that is easy to
convert into HTML.

All native support would do is lot in a specific Markdown feature set,
specific markdown styling, and specific Markdown syntax.

If you then tried to make a browser supported subset of Markdown that you then
allowed to be customised, you'd wind up with so much goop that nobody would be
happy.

Also, this: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
mholmes680
just a heads up, the site was marked by my company's net filter as containing
malware.

~~~
kristerv
interesting. Do you know where your company get's its filter data from? I
wouldn't be surprised if this domain was used dor something else before.

~~~
mholmes680
openDNS malware

------
silentrob
surge.sh

~~~
hyperhopper
surge.sh + emacs org mode is how Ive taken to doing most of my static web
hosting now; works like a charm

------
joe-mccann
dillinger.io

~~~
kristerv
interesting. i'll try reach the author see how they are doing.

------
kidlj
It's good.

