Blot turns a folder into a website

I announced Blot on Hacker News almost 10 years ago. Thank you all for helping to get it started. It was a nice surprise to see it posted again here today.<p>The goal of Blot is to bring the benefits of the static site generator to people who haven&#x27;t heard of static site generators

Express application that converts files to HTML with pandoc and serves the results, with a dashboard.<p>The TODO file in the repo[1] is fascinating.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidmerfield&#x2F;Blot&#x2F;blob&#x2F;39d9583395c190534bc2f1fc39683933833d67c2&#x2F;todo.txt">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidmerfield&#x2F;Blot&#x2F;blob&#x2F;39d9583395c190534...</a>

Related. Others?<p><i>Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. It turns a folder into a website</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32041158">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32041158</a> - July 2022 (9 comments)<p><i>Blot – a blogging platform with no interface</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17314858">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17314858</a> - June 2018 (120 comments)<p><i>Blot – blogging from a Dropbox folder</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10078031">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10078031</a> - Aug 2015 (17 comments)<p><i>Show HN: Blot, a static blog powered by Dropbox</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8183498">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8183498</a> - Aug 2014 (36 comments)

This makes me think of the early&#x2F;mid-2000s &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blosxom.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blosxom.sourceforge.net</a>. Blosxom had this delightful concept of file extensions as &quot;flavours.&quot; For example, you could have a &quot;.rss&quot; flavour that would present that hierarchy of your site as an RSS feed if you added &quot;.rss&quot; to the URL. Brilliant!

I briefly contributed to Blot (its code is Public Domain [1]). David keeps working on Blot constantly, and it&#x27;s pretty cool to see the progress changelog with direct mapping to git commits [2].<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidmerfield&#x2F;Blot">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidmerfield&#x2F;Blot</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blot.im&#x2F;news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blot.im&#x2F;news</a>

I recently migrated my own static Hugo blog onto Blot, and I just about couldn’t be happier with it.<p>I’m not versed in web development, but Blot’s developer (David) seems to have a great goal in mind &amp; similar enough priorities to what I wanted that it was a great fit. I finally got to set up the photography site I’d been planning, too.<p>It’s <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ristrettoshots.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ristrettoshots.com&#x2F;</a> if anyone was curious what one take on a Blot photo site would look like.

We&#x27;ve come full circle

1. Old solution becomes new again<p>2. Folks clamor that we actually had things right the first time<p>3. Hype dies down<p>4. Blog posts complain that the solution &quot;just doesn&#x27;t scale&quot; and that the complete opposite approach (or some hybrid) is better<p>5. GOTO 1

Haven&#x27;t tried blot, but I discovered that with a basic stylesheet &quot;tree -H&quot; can be super useful.

I do a low-tech version[1] of this using tree-1.8.0...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;every.sdf.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;every.sdf.org&#x2F;</a>

A similar thing: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiiny.host&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiiny.host&#x2F;</a><p>I use them and I&#x27;m a big fan.

Longtime fan of Blot and the founder&#x27;s (David) work.

Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never never heard of this and I’ve been working in web dev for 10+ years. I love this idea and I have some things I want to put out there without much management on my part. This will be perfect

I used Blot for about 5 years for Second Breakfast. Its ease of use got me started blogging. Very cool app&#x2F;service, highly recommend.<p>I had it strung up with RSS to Mailchimp to auto-send new posts to a mailing list. Recently just switched to Ghost to make that more integrated, we&#x27;ll see how it goes!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spinup.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spinup.dev</a> is a similar thing I made a few years ago, with free analytics out-of-the-box for each deploy. Syncing changes is a feature I&#x27;d like to add, but time is tight for side-projects at the moment.

I&#x27;ve been using Blot for years (for two websites), and I can&#x27;t say enough good things about it. Happy to see it featured here!

Can someone explain this to us 35+ year olds? What am I missing?

I built something similar - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mxsjoberg&#x2F;md2website">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mxsjoberg&#x2F;md2website</a>

Props to _0vzt for keeping Blot rocking for a decade - it&#x27;s like they&#x27;ve got a secret sauce for static site magic. And yeah, Sephr&#x27;s right about needing clearer pricing. It&#x27;s like playing hide and seek with numbers! Lastly, devjab&#x27;s take on pricing clarity is spot on. It&#x27;s a breath of fresh air when you don&#x27;t have to turn into a detective to figure out what something costs.

This is pretty much how my website worked back when running Dropbox as a headless service on Linux was “easy” and bloat-free. Glad to see it as a service.

Love the simplicity! Looks like this shouldn&#x27;t need a server, but instead could just be a static site generator. Am I missing something?

Is there an option to pay and to self host? Recently my boss asked me for things to spend money on to use up some budget at the end of the year. We can&#x27;t use hosting services but would pay for support or an &quot;enterprise&quot; edition if we could host it ourselves. Probably not your market but just something to consider.

You know what else turns a folder into a website? Installing nginx from your distro repositories. Then every folder beneath the www dir is a website. I&#x27;m not joking around. Files in folders is really the best way to make websites.

I’ve been using blot for YEARS and there’s a huge segment of people in the ttrpg world who have followed suit after being burned by so many platforms. Dev has been super helpful and responsive. Will be a customer for life.

Cool idea. This is a project I’ve done that feels in a similar vein. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pseudosavant&#x2F;player.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pseudosavant&#x2F;player.html</a>

I’ve been a happy blot user for a while now.<p>Thanks for building this.<p>Also, my website is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;independentlypoor.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;independentlypoor.com&#x2F;</a>

I sort of have a bad taste about this project. I&#x27;ll use proper support channels and won&#x27;t rant here, but what happened was that my card was being declined trying to sign up. Thought I could self-host on a linode somewhere given the code is in the public domain, but there is no documentation :&#x2F;

I love this service. Happy customer!

S-so does Apache?

Does anyone remember scriptogr.am? It was a similar idea, but it&#x27;s long gone now.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=scriptogr.am" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=scriptogr.am</a>

How does this compare to Zrok&#x27;s integrated server? I&#x27;ve been very impressed with zrok even though I haven&#x27;t done anything with it in production yet.

Would be cool if it could be self hosted

if json and xml files become database tables we can get rid of everything else

How do projects like this routes traffic? Similar to ngrok?

&gt; Files and folders whose name starts with an underscore do not become posts or pages. You can link to or embed them in posts.<p>So you cannot link to &quot;posts&quot;? Only to files whose names starts with underscore?

How about dynamic data from remote db ?

if only this website didnt autoplay

An interesting idea!

AKA www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts

If there only was a Docker image...