
Show HN: Blot, a static blog powered by Dropbox - dmerfield
https://blot.im/
======
justboxing
This is awesome! Congrats on your launch!

I saw your video intro also. I tried to do something similar using Flickr API
and Javascript -- to create free Photographer Portfolio websites using Dropbox
for my friend.

Then I abandoned the project few days after we went live because every few
days, the site visitor would get a bandwidth exceeded error from Dropbox and
the site would not render.

In this context, some questions for you

1) How do you account for Dropbox bandwidth usage exceeding? Esp. if I start
using your service, and my post ends up on front page of HN?

2) How do we embed Media, ex: Images and Videos? Is there some convention that
a blogger must follow in the markdown posts? Should the media be uploaded to
some common folder (like how wordpress has wp-upload folder) or does it reside
in a sub-folder?

3) URLs? How are urls handled? Do we have ability to over-ride it?

4) Archives (for SEO) ?

5) PermUrls (for social sharing) ?

6) Sitemaps to submit to google, yahoo etc (for increasing Traffic) ?

Sorry for all the questions, but I am really looking to use Dropbox for
blogging and this seems like a great idea! Just trying to make sure some/all
my needs are met.

~~~
dmerfield
Great questions! These are definitely things I should address on Blot's
website.

1) Blog posts are converted into HTML, stored on my servers, which Blot then
serves to people who visit your blog. Dropbox's bandwidth cap won't affect
your blog.

2) Currently you can use markdown to embed an external image. In future I want
to add a way to embed images that are inside Blot's Dropbox folder.

3) Each blog post is assigned an id. The slug after the ID is for SEO
purposes. For example, all these URLs point to the same blog post:

[http://david.blot.im/37/san-francisco-to-la](http://david.blot.im/37/san-
francisco-to-la)

[http://david.blot.im/37/foo-bar](http://david.blot.im/37/foo-bar)

[http://david.blot.im/37](http://david.blot.im/37)

I plan to add a mechanism to override the generated URL slug.

4) Blot automatically generates an archives page for each Blog. See my archive
page here:

[http://david.blot.im/archives](http://david.blot.im/archives)

5) I don't quite understand this question, did I answer this in #3?

6) Sitemaps are on the to do list!

~~~
justboxing
Many thanks for answering my questions. Yes You addressed #5 in #3.

Looking forward to seeing your updates on the Blot framework. Rock on!!

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kseistrup
Looks akin to Scriptogram ⌘
[http://scriptogr.am/about/](http://scriptogr.am/about/)

»Put simply, Scriptogr.am is a tool for generating simple, elegant, static
weblogs by reading Markdown files stored in your Dropbox folder.«

And you can host your own domain, too.

~~~
tenkabuto
Don't trust Scriptogram. They had a history of going dark, their support
page's been down for months, and their last tweet was 20 Nov 2013.

------
rb2e
I signed up. Was as simple to use as the video describes.

Things I would like added:

1)Possibility to add a seperate about page and other pages.

2)Allow for a one line blurb on sidebar to describe what the blog is all
about.

3)Custom Title for blog/site. Eg <name>'s blog to My Awesome Site.

4)Option to remove date from post instead of having to use CSS display:none:

Otherwise I'm happy. Was using WordPress and SquareSpace recently to host a
simple blog but felt like it was overkill. I do not like either of their
mobile apps. They feel clunky compared to IA Writer.

And for me, for writing, you cannot beat the simplicity of your favourite text
editor and dropbox for publishing. Whether on desktop or mobile. The
combination works really well.

First impressions, am happy with blot.im. Its barebones but lets see how it
turns out in the wild.

~~~
dmerfield
Awesome, thank you for giving it a try!

These are all good features to have.

1) About page and custom pages are on the to do list. I need to work out a
simple way to add this content from the user's perspective.

2 & 3) Great idea for the blurb and custom site title.

4) Interesting, hadn't anticipated this request. Would you like a global
option to hide publish dates?

And yeah, IA writer is excellent. It's great to be able to publish a blog post
from inside their mobile app!

~~~
bluthru
Maybe have each site page require an underscore: _about.txt, _links.txt, etc.
This way the pages appear at the top of the dropbox folder.

~~~
rb2e
I would have to second this. It would make things really easy and simple to
configure.

------
iamshs
This is so simple. Well done. Collaboration wise, and editing wise, this is
just a magnificent solution. All native.

Something to work on, as this is really plain jane:-

Media embedding? Comments? Custom URL generation? Some nice custom CSS's
available? Microsoft Word support? If I upload my Thesis (MS Word), will the
tables/pictures be automatically uploaded?

There is a chapter that I want to upload straightaway, and this solution can
be a godsend solution for that purpose. Cut the chapter and drop it in the
folder. 5 second work. I am amazed by the simplicity.

~~~
dmerfield
These are all great ideas.

Media embedding is already possible using markdown. I plan to add a feature to
embed media that you put inside Blot's folder.

Here's what I'm planning to add to Blot, roughly ordered by priority.

1\. Comments

2\. Support for other file formats. RTF will be the easiest to add next, then
DOC and perhaps PDF. There are libraries which make this relatively
straightforward but I need to evaluate them first.

3\. Custom blog post URLs. More generally allow you to customize each post's
metadata.

4\. Photo posts

~~~
graphene
For 2., pandoc recently gained the ability to read .docx files; might be
useful for you to have a look at.

Incidentally, what markdown converter are you using at the moment?

~~~
dmerfield
I'm currently using marked, which has worked wonderfully:

[https://github.com/chjj/marked](https://github.com/chjj/marked)

And will look into pandoc, thank you!

------
diverightin63
This looks cool, but I'm not a fan of this tagline: "Your current blogging
platform is complicated, slow and badly designed. It makes blogging a chore."

~~~
bachmeier
I came to write the same thing. I use org-mode + Jekyll and it couldn't get
any less complicated. It's not slow and not badly designed either, IMO.

~~~
dmerfield
Really appreciate the feedback. Will come up with some alternatives to this
copy to test.

~~~
bachmeier
I think you'd be better off to just drop the statement completely. The line
below it reads, "Blot is the simplest way to blog." That's short, clear, and
tells the visitor why he/she should be interested.

------
wuschel
This looks interesting. Congratulations on your product launch.

There is something similar out there called _calepin_ (1). It uses the python
based _pelican_ static web site generator. Not sure what extra features your
solution offers.

(1) [http://calepin.co/](http://calepin.co/)

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conradk
Looks cool! Simple to say the least, which is not easy to do!

But I'm worried about something. The credit card input on the payment page
shows a lock even though the form is NOT submitted over HTTPS... that makes it
look like you're blatantly lying to your customers. Am I missing something?

EDIT: I was missing something. While the HN post links to the HTTPS version, I
somehow ended up on a non HTTPS version of the site at some point. Which seems
to allow sending CC information over a non encrypted form.

~~~
dmerfield
Ah shoot, good catch. That page shouldn't be accessible over HTTP. Will push a
fix to force a redirect to HTTPS.

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krat0sprakhar
Nice idea! I've been meaning to design something similar for myself but once I
tried Jekyll I was sold! One tip - The responsive layout[0] makes the blog
post very narrow and unreadable. Hiding the side menu might probably give more
room to the content.

[0] - [http://drp.io/SP](http://drp.io/SP)

------
nodesocket
Great job! Does it support all of markdown? Can I use code blocks, and you'll
use < pre > tags? Also, if I have multiple h1's (#) which do you use as the
title?

My only feedback is charge per month, and more. I'd be willing to pay $4 a
month without thinking twice.

How do you handle scale if you are hosting it? Are you load balanced? Highly
available? Do you use a CDN?

~~~
dmerfield
Thank you! Blot does support all of markdown. You can indeed use code blocks!

The title is generated from the first H1 tag if there is one.

Scaling the site is honestly something I'm going to have to learn more about.
I'll set up a load balancer before it becomes necessary. Currently a single
EC2 instance seems to be working OK.

As for pricing, the price will only go up in future and perhaps I'll move to a
monthly fee. I just wanted to get something set up quickly.

~~~
nodesocket
Let me know if I can help with infrastructure. I'm the founder of
[https://commando.io](https://commando.io) and can help you with server setup,
management, and deployment. We also use nginx heavily and can assist
optimizing it for serving your static content. Send me an e-mail, it is in my
profile.

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atmosx
Given the amount of free-of-charge choices, I really fail to see why someone
would want to pay anything more than a domain-name for a blog, professional or
otherwise.

But that's just me.

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zyxley
Is the pricing for a single site, or does it allow for multiple sites?

Are MultiMarkdown features (linking to internal sections, footnotes,
definition lists, etc) available?

~~~
dmerfield
The pricing is currently for a single site. No support for multiple sites as
of this moment.

And not yet, I'll have to look into MultiMarkdown. Those features sound like a
good idea.

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motyar
Nice and what a clean and clear "Terms of Use"

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CyberpunkDad
What advantage does dropbox and your service have over say hosting your site
on github with Jekyll?

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computador
I just wanted to congratulate you. This reminds me of the good old Gopher
protocol.

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PeterWhittaker
Slick! Good questions from justboxing, though, esp. around bandwidth....

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v1tyaz
Do you have any plans to support Google Drive or other cloud services?

