

GitHub is one commit away from being the ultimate blog engine - bcardarella
http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/2011/11/14/github-is-one-commit-away-from-being-the-ultimate-blog-engine.html
I just realized the title might sound like I'm putting down GitHub, that's not the point. I love GitHub.
======
metra
A major feature that Jekyll is missing is commenting. Relying on Disqus, a
closed source platform, is not ideal because it slows down page load times,
does not contribute to SEO, and it does not let you host and search for
comments in your git repo.

Some people argue that adding a dynamic commenting system contradicts the
static html goal of Jekyll. Going along those lines, critics say that a
conversation is best carried out on 3rd party sites like HN. However, for
technical blog posts specifically, a two-way conversation helps illuminate
finer points in the original blog post.

Googling around for 'jekyll comments' or 'disqus open source alternative'
reveals many people who would use such an idea. However, aside from some
quick-and-dirty projects, I see no compelling open source alternative to
disqus that will include features such as OpenId, spam prevention, comment
threads, etc. Does anyone know of such a project?

~~~
simanyay
Engineer from Disqus here, I work on the front-end side of our product.

Disqus doesn't slow down page load times because we use a non-blocking
technique to load required files. We work hard to make sure that we don't add
any performance regressions to sites using Disqus.

We are also working on making comments made via our product indexable by
search engines.

As for the open source version of Disqus, I am not sure what you mean by that
since Disqus is a service and not a program that you can download and install.
People prefer Disqus because they don't want to spend time implementing and
hosting discussion platforms for their websites just like people using GitHub
don't want to spend time implementing and hosting developer collaboration
software.

Anton

P.S. If you are having problems with Disqus slowing down your page, email me
at anton@disqus.com and I will check it out.

~~~
ninjin
If we put the ideological issues aside there are some other potential issues
about using Disqus that I have thought of:

1.) Control of data, I am not sure what rights I am legally signing away to
Disqus when using it as my comment service.

2.) Continuity, I am certain that if Disqus passes away the service won't be
there and only fools would offer a free service and ensure that the data isn't
lost for what ever reason. How are your data liberation policies, a simple
click for a zip or a tar-ball? Or would I need to construct my own back-up
using your API? If the latter, is that allowed?

~~~
simanyay
You can export your data whenever you want and the process is as easy as
clicking one button: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/447925/Screenshots/ao8k.png>

Nothing changes when you comment on a website using Disqus—your comment is
published on someone's website and becomes their data. That said, if a comment
was not originally anonymous, you have an option to anonymize it so that it is
not associated with your profile and name anymore. We are and will always be
on commenters' side.

This is what I can authoritatively say as a Disqus engineer. If you want more
information, email to hello@disqus.com and folks here will be happy to answer
all your questions.

Anton

------
swanson
I started down this path before they even added Ace to the site.

My idea was a little bit different: I would drop in a single file to my Jekyll
repo that adds a "Create a new post" page on my blog. There is a text field
with a live markdown preview and a "Commit" button that would make the calls
(via javascript) to the Github API to create a new commit in the repository.
This commit triggers the hooks that rebuild the blog.

The main hurdle was authentication, since Github OAuth doesn't support any
client-side flows (which is understandable since it's not a completed spec, to
my knowledge). So I would have to pass my user/pass in everytime.

But I got the API calls all working (after Github support helped me get CORS
working), but I lost interest in the project and it's just sitting around
collecting dust

The code: <https://github.com/swanson/lanyon/tree/gh-pages>

Demo that doesn't quite work: <http://swanson.github.com/lanyon/>

------
freshhawk
That's an incredibly low bar to set for something to be "the ultimate". I can
smell the fanboyism from here!

------
kam
Creating new files from the web-based editor is a little feature that should
really be there.

There's another good use-case, which I've suggested to them: Their "We
recommend adding a README..." message could just link to a markdown editor,
making it really easy to put up some documentation.

------
daniel_levine
While GitHub is great I think it is more likely that DropBox becomes a
dominant blog engine.

Already there are things like TiddlyWiki and DropPages that do this and it's
much more approachable for the average user.

I also think as DropBox teams improves and iterates it will be interesting to
see more people using Dropbox for basic version control, probably not a good
idea but I think it'll happen.

~~~
alexcabrera
See my comment above. We've built and launched this at <http://droptype.com>.
Would love to hear your thoughts.

~~~
chipsy
This sounds like something I want to use. Some impressions:

The first thing I did was edit my profile, but I found that it doesn't give me
enough feedback about errors. I tried changing everything all at once(of
course) and then got greeted with the previous defaults. It took some trial
and error to figure out that it wasn't accepting the RGBA PNG I had picked out
for a profile picture. I'd also like a direct link to the markdown formatting
docs, or even just a quick summary, on the profile editing screen.

My profile finished, I proceeded to look in my Dropbox folder. The README is
not formatted for Windows Notepad and appears as one long line of text. I
switched to NP++ and continued to write a "hello.txt" containing a link and an
image. It shows up, so I go back and edit the README, too. Everything is in
order, but what is this "cloud+arrow" button? Inspecting it reveals it's
publishing, but I don't feel confident about whether I've published hello.txt
until I log out and check.

I might continue using this. Some last thoughts:

I will probably want options to organize posts. There isn't enough
documentation to know if I already have them.

I found myself wondering if there was a shortcut for marking up the image that
would let me point to a folder inside Dropbox without tabbing out to find the
public link.

I may not want the displayed title of README to be README.

~~~
alexcabrera
Thanks for the feedback. Some quick responses:

\- You're absolutely right, we definitely need more error feedback.

\- We're planning on writing a Markdown tutorial on site and building a
browser-based editor (based on Ace, most likely). Will take this under
advisement.

\- I need to test with more variety of profile images. I held back on doing
this until I could abstract away the entire image handling code.

\- We wrote all the text files on a Mac so we're probably seeing some problems
with Windows vs. *nix line-endings. I'll address this tomorrow.

\- You're not the first person to be confused about how we're handling
publishing, so we'll address this in a UI update.

\- In terms of publishing images, we want to be able to process more than just
text files in your Dropbox, so eventually you'll be able to relatively link to
images instead of having to host them somewhere else. Our browser-based editor
will let you browse your Dropbox and select images.

\- We do support custom titles (and summaries) using the MultiMarkdown
formatting syntax. Just make the first line of your text file look like this:

    
    
        Title: The title I want
        Summary: A summary of my text file
    

And that will customize the title and give you a summary. If that title line
is missing, it'll just set the title to the filename.

\---

Again, thanks for the feedback and I hope you can give it another go once we
make a few tweaks. I really appreciate you input.

~~~
karterk
Do you have any sample sites who are using your service? If so, you should
feature them on the front page.

~~~
alexcabrera
Not just yet, we're waiting to roll out our theme engine before we feature
anyone.

------
todd3834
I don't think GitHub is planning to nor should compete in that market. The
Jekyll/blog hosting stuff has been a neat side effect and I am glad that
GitHub hasn't gone out of their way to prevent that type of use but I'm sure
they have no desire to be a blog engine.

~~~
nosequel
If they have the talent, time, and funds (they have all three btw), why
shouldn't they? The might have not a lot of competition right now, but that
will change in the future I'm sure. Any competitive advantage is a plus IMHO.
As a developer who uses github everyday, I love that I can use my normal
workflow to post to a blog if I so wish.

------
kellysutton
If they put a more consumer-friendly face on it, they could probably go toe-
to-toe with many other platforms out there. Not quite their core business,
though.

~~~
bcardarella
definitely not their core business, but it seems like it is such a short
distance to get there from where things currently stand. And I really like
Jekyll and using GitHub to host.

------
mwsherman
I think version control and content management are complimentary in some ways,
but how is serving static files an “ultimate blog engine”? I feel like we’ve
had that for a few years.

What might actually happen is that Git or Dropbox become the interface through
which we “put files on the web”. One’s blog is just a subset of files that one
is maintaining anyway.

That’s nice, and a consolidation of tools. But not, um, advanced.

~~~
bricestacey

        What might actually happen is that Git or Dropbox become the interface 
        through which we “put files on the web”.
    

There are some tools that exist already. Here is one that I recently
discovered. <http://www.kissr.co/>. There was another one also posted on HN
recently, I forget its name.

------
grandalf
In other news, google docs is one commit away from being the ultimate blog
engine.

------
alexcabrera
We recently launched an app - <http://droptype.com> \- that tries to do static
site generation using Markdown files over Dropbox. It's still very much a
proof-of-concept and we're retooling to make it a bit more full-featured; but
the eventual idea is to let you let you publish web content by just arranging
files on any cloud storage platform.

Again, it's still very early and this is more to prove that the idea is
doable, but we'd love to hear any input. We're working on some commonly
requested features like customized designs, cname redirection, rss feeds. The
idea is to have a very hacker friendly publishing tool that doesn't require
very much work to set up.

------
DanielRibeiro
Github's founder Tom Preston Werner had a similar article]1]: _Blogging Like a
Hacker_

[1] [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-
hac...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html)

------
mmahemoff
A problem with this approach though is you end up having to manage a directory
full of files called MyAwesomeBlogPost.html etc. Or perhaps using a date or
sequence based prefix to keep them in some order. A little tricky to manage
once you have dozens of posts...so you'd want some front-end...but these days,
it could be a TiddlyWiki or some other pure JavaScript app based on CORS (like
swanson mentions in the present thread
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235457>)

------
taylorbuley
I'm a coder at a big media company.

I would die to find a gaggle of people who want to work with me on a simple
CMS on top of Git.

~~~
alexro
Who you see as your primary audience for this type of thing? I just don't
think developers do CMS a lot

~~~
taylorbuley
It would definitely have to be designed for the kind of crowd that's never
installed Jekyll.

As paleolithic as it sounds, I think a CMS build on flat files would be a lot
easier to manage than a CMS built on a relational data store.

If you don't need accounts and personalization, or can just do that all client
side, you could simply load balance across micro AWS instances pulling from
the git repo and stick everything behind Cloudfront -- all for a few quarters
an hour.

~~~
wyclif
The CMS on flat files thing has been done before, for example with a Perl
script: <http://www.blosxom.com/>

Nevertheless I think the concept has potential if done right (and with Github
or Dropbox).

