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fine.sh

76 pointsWittBulter37 comments

It’s funny that this README just assumes you have Node installed. Not having ever used it before, I had no idea what “npx” was or did. A “requirements” or “dependencies” section on the homepage would be nice, as would a comparison to other static site generators.

Thanks. I have need something like this, but the web pages do not indicate anything about what it does, how it works or how to use it. I don't have Node installed, either, so it was a waste of time clicking through. I wonder why it was posted here?

It’s not that well written but ‘why was it posted’ because it doesn’t introduce npx is a bit much.

It’s also easily put together by the next example (uses npm) and google, if you were actually interested in the subject.

I see tons of Rust CLI projects with precious little about their requirements.

Sure, a not complete README is nice, but not having one is not exactly weird.

Hell I have node and I don't even know what npx is. There should be a PEP8 for readme's. Can a 5 year old figure out your README? or something close to that extent. Otherwise their README is fine.

It is explained in the next paragraph what "npx" is:

> Yep. cool? “npx” allows you to run a temporary package, which will be deleted right after each use. Use this command to try and experience how Fine works. Doesn’t hurt to try, huh?

It's not a satisfactory explanation for the layman, because it still assumes that you know that a package refers to something on npm, and that npx itself is a part of Node/npm.

All it would really need to say is that it requires a recent version of Node.

I have read this a couple of times, and I still have no idea what it is telling me or doing. What am I missing?

Seems like essentially a free hosting service for websites generated from Markdown

Do you know how it is free? The cost of hosting static document only sites will be low but not zero. So is the cost being eaten by the owner or are adverts/tracking inserted?

if you have enough money, it's a common strategy to make a free product to attract users. Once you have an important user-base, your company has a value

So the upsell comes later?

Of course!

not always. i'd be happy to throw a little money at hosting a ton of stuff if it served as a load-test for my work. unfortunately, trying to find something to give away that other people will use isn't as easy as one might think

Even if you don't have a lot of money, you can probably run a niche product like that for little money, as long as it doesn't get too popular.

The key is to invent a new term for an existing entity. Here the author tries to introduce the term "document site" for static websites.

hehe, I guess it's translated from Chinese

The Chinese version does use the literal equivalent 文档站点. However, the usual term used by Chinese developers for static sites appears to be 静态网站 (see e.g. the entry in Baidu's encyclopedia https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%9D%99%E6%80%81%E7%BD%91%E7%... )

Maybe the author was simply unaware that static site generators exist because all they wanted to do was upload documents.

It's a static site generator

Tied to a single hosting provider

Sounds just like Infogami used to be. You know what infogami turned into? A small public database. 99% of the traffic we got was to a single page which was just a config file for a popular Firefox add on.

This is the same basic idea as Surge [1] by the looks of it. IIRC, it requires Node as well.

[1] https://surge.sh/

Also, this is very similar to ZEIT Now[1]

[1]: https://zeit.co/now

"fine.sh can be used ONLY to distribute contents without implications in any kind for financial gains.

fine.sh reserves the right to remove illegal or inappropriate contents without prior warnings to its users and assist authorities on any necessary investigation."

I'm surprised coffeescript is still used for new projects https://github.com/just-fine/fine.sh-cli

Javascript with fewer {} is nice.

So to be clear, this site takes an MD file and publishes it to one of its fine paths as an HTML file?

Apparently... seems like some kind of malware seed that somehow made it past the moderators. Read the entire site and the description is entirely useless.

Why is it named fine.sh? It’s not a shell script. I was kind of interested until I read npx. (Then looked it up and found out it’s some node thing). Now I’m disappointed. It’s just misleading.

Probably just happened to be the shortest domain extension avaliable for “fine”

.sh is Saint Helena's country code tld, so it doesn't need to have anything to do with shell scripting. It's not like the site is fine.bash or something...

I'm making a project similar to this called NanoCD: https://github.com/tkjef/nanocd

except can be used with any SSG or plain static sites on S3, GCS or Spaces (from digitalocean).

The dependencies are noted clearly in the README. ;)

> <a href="javascript:;" target="_blank" class="cell">中文 / Chinese</a>

Why?

Suggestion: in your example, clearly show what you’re inputting (including contents of the input file/folder), then in the end, clearly show what is outputted with a link to the output file.

Doesn't surge already do this?

All things considered 3 seconds isn't impressive.

My site is fully loaded and functional in the browser in 1.6s according to https://www.webpagetest.org/ and its a giant web app with more than 1.5mb of JavaScript application code.

As far as actually generating documentation my documentation is dynamically built into various formats from a data object and written to file in about 3ms.

This builds & deploys your site on a public custom domain name in '3s'.

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