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Comment by kristerv | Hacker News Reader

I have many informational websites like http://www.krister.ee and sometimes I register domains on a whim when I get a really good idea for a website. I decided to create a simple tool to help manage these microsites and in addition to buying a domain I can immediately fill it with demo-content using markdown.

Before I get into feature creep (hero image, forms, analytics) I'd like to work on reaching an audience. Problem is, I'm not sure who would appreciate it. I know it's a useful tool so any tips on how to spread the word is greatly appreciated.

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Your target market is somebody that wants to create lots of minimalist websites quickly. (those creating one personal website whose priority is getting things done likely skip the "evaluate best alternatives" step and go straight to Tumblr/Wordpress or their favourite social network.)

Unfortunately, apart from polymaths that just want to share their expertise on as many discrete subjects as possible which I'm not convinced is the biggest target market, it's probably blogspammers and astroturfers...

Also troll websites, for example, http://www.makecppgreatagain.com, or http://opisaflag.com

Some legitimate use cases:

- Single page property websites/subdomains created by brokers (www.123mainstreet.com)

- parked domain landing pages

thanks for the input. You may be right on this one. We'll see.

I think there is some overlap with Jekyll. Personally, Jekyll works better for me atm, as it produces static content, can be hosted for free on github or cheaply on s3 and has a bigger community and backing of github engineering. So perhaps, it's worthwhile to try and figure out jekyll-lite or something like that? For me setting up jekyll was a pain, I had to get ruby, rubygems, jekyll itself and then a manual config intervention to make it work for me. If this could be simplified that would be a huge improvement.

I personally use Hugo, written in Go rather than Ruby, Jekyll eats up CPU in a very weird way when you run it as a server, don't like my lap on fire after I fire it up. Also love Mkdocs, for static doc creation.

I'm using Jekyll right now and I'm surprised how slow it gets. With only about 20 pages with a few shared includes and a few loops on some pages build times quickly climb to a few seconds. The only advice I'm finding for this issue is to avoid loops and Liquid tags.

It's interesting you'd use jekyll server rather than just to generating static pages. If I wasn't just using an engine server anyway I could see the appeal of hugo.

I don't use the server. It's just when you are working on a static site it's nice to have it constantly update. Hence the server. Hugo auto-reloads the page every time you save. Makes for a good experience to preview what you are doing. Suppose you could use a specific Markdown editor instead to preview the changes.

I've been working on a Jekyll-like system for fun over the past couple of weeks. I've tried to make it as painless to install as possible, but it does require Python 3.

https://github.com/fredley/mirage

Was planning on doing a Show HN if/when I'd made it a bit more robust. It makes sites that look like this: http://mirage.mamota.net

Do you cater only to blogs or to static website in general? I tried both Hugo and pelican but neither really supported general purpose websites.

For example, https://hearthstonejson.com uses Jekyll and I haven't been able to move it.

Only blogs, I primarily build this for my own use.

I will look at it anyway, but the #1 issue with hugo/pelican is that they essentially force you into the "you have posts and you have a homepage that embeds posts" logic. It's super annoying.

Jekyll has a ton of issues but it gets it right at least: any page you make becomes a page on the site.

I couldn't agree more – after reading a recommendation for hugo I spent hours browsing its docs thinking "So how the hell do I build a simple static website?!"

yeah Jekyll is really good for what it does. I think markdownsites offers something that jekyll doesn't - almost non-existent setup worries.

Also one of my goals is that my non-coder friends could get their websites up with little effort. So Jekyll is great, but for IT savvy people.

It'd be cool to make use of their current templates and input the content in for them then. I have never actually used Jekyll though so I don't know if my understanding translates to practicality or even makes any sense.

Can you give a quick summary of how it works? Who are you using to host? Didn't see any info in the About section.

Realize you're saying you don't want to add any features but some quick mobile optimization to make the links more readable / clickable on a small screen would go a long way.

Sure.

It's a meteor.js app with React.js at the front. Namecheap to buy domains and Braintree to handle payments. Hosting on Scalingo (awesome service btw). Hmm.. what else.. the chat plugin is tawk.to - be sure to check that out.

I'll be sure to improve the mobile view soon, thanks for the comment!

Thank you for technical details!

Why do you use braintree but not use namecheap for everything? Avoiding lock-in or some technical reasons?

I can't recall the exact details, but I did try to use as few services as possible. I think the problem was something about how namecheap's pricing model worked. Or was it the site that didn't have a customizeable paying popup. Not sure, tried quite many different services many months ago.

My first thought was Github Pages + Jekyll + a Jekyll template. And then it's been wrapped in a script that has the domain name bonus.

Not saying what you're doing isn't a good idea; I'm just not quite sure where the big distinction (and attraction) is. Is it that the process is more shrink-wrapped?

yeah the idea is just to be as simple as possible.

Mostly-text websites that aren't a blog. That's quite a lot of categories of things people might like to put on the web that fit that.

I've always thought something like this would be useful if properly narrowed to a particular niche, where creating a simple, informational site quickly and easily is useful (i.e. local restaurant menu). Would likely want to include templating of some kind.

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