
Cactus for Mac – A fast, easy and free static site generator - gprasanth
http://cactusformac.com/
======
koenbok
Maker here. This is a nice UI based on the open source:
[https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus/tree/v3](https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus/tree/v3)

We decided to make it free to fully focus on
[http://framerjs.com](http://framerjs.com), out prototyping tool:
[http://cactusformac.com/blog/posts/cactus-and-
glueprint.html](http://cactusformac.com/blog/posts/cactus-and-glueprint.html)

~~~
frozenport
The mac only stuff is a real turn-off. It might be informative to look at the
website visitor statistics to see the piece of the pie you're missing.

~~~
veidr
Different perspective: Mac-only is a very attractive feature for some people.
I blog infrequently, and only ever do it from one of my Macs. A solid, native
Mac-only app is the only way to make the best possible app of this kind for OS
X.

So for me, and others in similar circumstances, it is actually a very
attractive feature (and the thing that made me click through to see what
Cactus is all about).

I don't care about blogging from Windows or Linux, since I don't ever do that.

(I do care about open source, though, so I would encourage the authors to open
source the whole app, if at all possible.)

EDIT: Hmm, but after playing with it I see that this tool doesn't actually
provide native _editing_ , which is the part where a native OS X app would be
the most useful. This tool just kicks you out to your text editor to actually
edit content. (I was thinking it would be something more like MarsEdit, but
instead of publishing to one of the blog services, published to a static
blog.)

~~~
jbeja
Don't know if your current demography actually take into account your point of
view, many things kill a app but nothing kill it faster than assuming that you
and your audience are on the same page. A example, would be me.

~~~
eddieroger
Maybe you're not the maker's target demographic. Not being a Mac user, for
example.

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doomlaser
It's frustrating to try a static site generator that doesn't just spit out a
directory I can upload to a webhost. Why all the required Amazon integration?

~~~
danoprey
It does. Check the .build folder for uploadable files to any host.

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lm2s
Indeed it does, but IMHO it could do it more openly (i.e., provide easier
access directly from the app itself).

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saturdayplace
Must be something in the water. I'm working on something similar I hope to
release early this year that should work cross platform. My plan was to build
it as a self-hosted web app, so all the editing happens in the browser, but
trigger commands that eventually generate the static site, and help with
deploying. See you in show HN in a few...

~~~
valuegram
I'm working on a static site generation web app as well, although mine won't
be self hosted. Good luck to you! For me it was a convergence of: 1)
Outstanding cost/benefit of static file serving. 2) Current static site
solutions being too complicated for most end users. 3) Bloated content
management system alternatives.

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aridiculous
I took it for a spin and enjoyed it. It would be even more awesome if there
was a deploy to Github pages that was as easy as the AWS deploy.

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mrmondo
It would be great if you could deploy this as easily in places other than AWS.

~~~
danoprey
You can, you can directly upload the contents of the .build folder to any
host.

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darylteo
So I wrote a 2 liner plugin that replaces .html with no extension, with the
idea that I could upload them to s3, but facing the following problems:

\- server doesn't deliver the file with the right mime-type. \- uploading to
s3 doesn't yield the right mimetype either, I have to manually set them.

Can Cactus deal with either of these?

Edit: okay, so put prettify: true in config.json, and it generates directories
with index.html in them for directory urls. Neat. I don't really want dir/
urls, but it'll do.

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Xeoncross
I wrote a static, static site generator called "Jr"
([https://github.com/Xeoncross/jr](https://github.com/Xeoncross/jr)). There
really is nothing you need to do but write your posts. The client's browser
renders the whole site when it's requested.

There is nothing to install, nothing to setup, nothing you have to generate. I
don't know how to make it simpler and yet still self-hosted.

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popasmurf
I have personally used in the past Fenix -
[http://fenixwebserver.com/](http://fenixwebserver.com/)

It's very easy to deploy sites and even runs
[http://localtunnel.me/](http://localtunnel.me/) to share your locally hosted
site over the web.

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minhajuddin
Shameless Plug: I built a simple app which allows creating/managing and
hosting static websites using Dropbox:
[http://www.websrvr.in/](http://www.websrvr.in/) It minifies and gzips all
your html, js and css too.

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chuckcode
The video demo[1] makes it look like this is a command line template
generator? Be great to have some additional information about what this tool
does and how it does it.

[1] [http://vimeo.com/46999791](http://vimeo.com/46999791)

~~~
koenbok
Cactus is a static site generator. That is a video about the command line
version. The site and docs should do a pretty good job at explaining. Or just
download it and check it out for yourself.

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Animats
Is there an open-source replacement for Dreamweaver that's any good? There
have been many attempts, but few have both a good WYSIWYG editor and site-
maintenance capability. Many have some strong bias towards some template
system, not raw HTML5.

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unicornporn
Not open-source, but [http://macaw.co/](http://macaw.co/)

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mkhattab
I'm curious as to why this project is using Django templates (as opposed to
Jinja2)? Django is a heavy dependency if you're just planning on using Django
templates. Also, from what I've read, it appears that Jinja2 is more
extensible.

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mauz0r
I like this app very much but only used it during the trial. (It was a bit
expensive imho.) It is nice to see that is open source now. Really hoped this
would be the next iWeb successor. I dint know about framerjs; it looks neat!

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blablabla123
Cool app, is there something similar for Windows? Frequently people ask me for
simple web editing software...

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sinemetu11
Why would someone want to use this instead of jekyll or similar?

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unicornporn
Not all people are comfortable with a terminal window you know...

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tuananh
just an opinion: i really don't want to tie my site with an os x-only app.

for these geeky people to tinker with static site, i _think_ they would prefer
actively developed, unix-friendly tool.

but what do i know, i'm just one person.

~~~
danoprey
It's available on UNIX systems from the CLI, and is open source:
[https://github.com/koenbok/cactus](https://github.com/koenbok/cactus)

~~~
tuananh
Cool then. I didn't know about this.

