Show HN: Blot, a static blog powered by Dropbox

This is awesome! Congrats on your launch!<p>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.<p>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.<p>In this context, some questions for you<p>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?<p>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?<p>3) URLs? How are urls handled? Do we have ability to over-ride it?<p>4) Archives (for SEO) ?<p>5) PermUrls (for social sharing) ?<p>6) Sitemaps to submit to google, yahoo etc (for increasing Traffic) ?<p>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&#x2F;all my needs are met.

Looks akin to Scriptogram ⌘ <a href="http://scriptogr.am/about/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scriptogr.am&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a><p>»Put simply, Scriptogr.am is a tool for generating simple, elegant, static weblogs by reading Markdown files stored in your Dropbox folder.«<p>And you can host your own domain, too.

I signed up. Was as simple to use as the video describes.<p>Things I would like added:<p>1)Possibility to add a seperate about page and other pages.<p>2)Allow for a one line blurb on sidebar to describe what the blog is all about.<p>3)Custom Title for blog&#x2F;site. Eg &lt;name&gt;&#x27;s blog to My Awesome Site.<p>4)Option to remove date from post instead of having to use CSS display:none:<p>Otherwise I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>First impressions, am happy with blot.im. Its barebones but lets see how it turns out in the wild.

This is so simple. Well done. Collaboration wise, and editing wise, this is just a magnificent solution. All native.<p>Something to work on, as this is really plain jane:-<p>Media embedding? Comments? Custom URL generation? Some nice custom CSS&#x27;s available? Microsoft Word support? If I upload my Thesis (MS Word), will the tables&#x2F;pictures be automatically uploaded?<p>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.

This looks cool, but I&#x27;m not a fan of this tagline: &quot;Your current blogging platform is complicated, slow and badly designed. It makes blogging a chore.&quot;

This looks interesting. Congratulations on your product launch.<p>There is something similar out there called <i>calepin</i> (1). It uses the python based <i>pelican</i> static web site generator. Not sure what extra features your solution offers.<p>(1) <a href="http://calepin.co/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calepin.co&#x2F;</a>

Looks cool! Simple to say the least, which is not easy to do!<p>But I&#x27;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&#x27;re blatantly lying to your customers. Am I missing something?<p>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.

Nice idea! I&#x27;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.<p>[0] - <a href="http://drp.io/SP" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;drp.io&#x2F;SP</a>

Great job! Does it support all of markdown? Can I use code blocks, and you&#x27;ll use &lt; pre &gt; tags? Also, if I have multiple h1&#x27;s (#) which do you use as the title?<p>My only feedback is charge per month, and more. I&#x27;d be willing to pay $4 a month without thinking twice.<p>How do you handle scale if you are hosting it? Are you load balanced? Highly available? Do you use a CDN?

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.<p>But that&#x27;s just me.

Is the pricing for a single site, or does it allow for multiple sites?<p>Are MultiMarkdown features (linking to internal sections, footnotes, definition lists, etc) available?

Nice and what a clean and clear &quot;Terms of Use&quot;

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

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

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

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