Staticman: user-generated content for static sites | Hacker News Reader

Staticman: user-generated content for static sites

staticman.net

52 pointsbenburwell23 comments

Wanted to try out a bit. But approving a permission request for "read/write all the Github PRIVATE repository" and "read/WRITE all the my info." is alarmingly risky...

And this site itself is not even open-sourced? hmmm.

I admit that sucks a bit, but unfortunately the GitHub API doesn't offer per-repository scopes. I'll have to think of a better way, maybe Staticman could be a bot that you give access to on a specific repo.

If you want to make this project a success, consider to release it under an open source license!

Or just send pull requests, if a user doesn't want to grant push access (this can also be used as comment moderation)

The definition of 'static' here I think may be a little different. It appears you are repurposing technologies to effectively be a database which aren't considered a database (at least in this context) in order to dynamically generate content in the users browser on the fly.

So templated dynamic html from a "database" is a fine architecture, but not what most people I think would call "static".

A "static" system would be more like Doxygen where the content is "compiled" into straight html/css pages

So now we've come full circle to what Movable Type did over a decade ago (static generation based on contents stored in a database)?

Or CityDesk from Fog Creek 14 years ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000010.html

Did those software support user content such as comments? Also, from my understanding, this project relies on flat files and not a db. So you could essentially eliminate the need for any http requests.

Movable Type supported user comments as well as trackbacks and pingbacks.

This definitely looks malicious. Is the business model controlling everybody's repos??

Not really my plan, no. Sorry it looks malicious to you.

Is it possible to OAuth on GitHub from the static site, have a nice form there that creates a pull request on this repo, then travis validates it?

Makes up for Wiki, comments, user login, …

I love the idea. I'm a fan of static sites but always dreaded having to rely on disqus and the like. Any chance you plan to open source this?

Thanks! Nothing against making it open source, no.

But are you considering opening this up?

If you don't prefer a third-party comments system for whatever, you can always host your own and insert it in your static site the same as you would with Disqus. I was considering doing this for a while and found React has a pretty good tutorial https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

Pretty nifty! Do you decide to go down this route?

Nope. Tempting as it was, I just ended up using Disqus. :)

Spam detection of some sort would be a necessity.

Agree! Definitely something I need to look into. Thanks.

This throws an invalid SSL cert warning on Android Chrome.

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

Their certificate is signed by a trusted CA, but they forgot to ship the intermediate certificate.

I always test my domains with Quals SSL server test:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=staticman.net

There are a couple of other issues with their SSL setup. I also recommend Mozilla's SSL config generator:

https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generat...

My bad. Will look into this. Thanks!

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