
Show HN: Hypertextual – a blogging framework to fight chickenshit minimalism - eckza
https://github.com/angrysql/hypertextual
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enkiv2
It seems a little like overkill to bring ruby into the equation here. Standard
shell tools can do this just fine.

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mondoshawan
Along these lines, I had built up my site using makefiles, imagemagick, and a
little perl (to translate multimarkdown to HTML). Super simple, super
lightweight.

Never really understood why site generation needed custom tools, on demand
page generation, databases, etc for what amounts to the web equivalent of a
mail merge.

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eckza
Very cool... can I get a link?

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mondoshawan
Its on my server, which is currently offline. I'll see if I can dig up the
source in a day or so.

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Rainymood
Put up a simple screenshot with an example and I'm 50% more likely to try it
out

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eckza
Even moreso than a live sample?
[https://hypertextual.herokuapp.com/](https://hypertextual.herokuapp.com/)

I guess I didn't communicate very well that the site could be viewed live at
that URL.

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Raed667
There is this a kind of "elitism" that pushes people to think that blogs are
just chunks of text. This might be true in I.T but a lot of bloggers need ways
to style and insert rich interactions in order to better tell their story.

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eckza
That's absolutely true! hypertextual isn't a one-size-fits all thing, by any
means; for me, it's about building what I need - no more and no less - and
then getting to use what I've built.

If someone else uses it, I'll be excited! If nobody else ever uses it, I'll
still be excited - because as simple as it is, it's something that I can use,
and enjoy using.

And to be fair - Markdown is pretty damn expressive... you just have to roll
your own expression if you want anything beyond the basics. But again - it's
about only using what I need, and about getting to use what I've built.

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CIPHERSTONE
What advantage does this have over say Jekyll?

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eckza
No idea. I don't know what Jekyll is; I'm not really a web developer and I'm
in the early stages of learning Rails.

I read that talk by Maciej Ceglowski and it made me really want to build
something of my own, so I did.

There are probably other solutions out there that do the same thing, but I
really wanted to roll up my sleeves, write something, and fling it out into
the ether to see what happened.

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Semiapies
You might find Jekyll and similar stuff interesting - basically, software for
building fully static websites from a similar starting point. I don't know
that it's strictly necessary, as the real problem is front-end bulk.

But yes, diving in and making something that works is a good impulse.

