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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

Not affiliated but I think Netlify offers a similar level of initial effort but with more room for later growth.

Yeah, they let you drag and drop a zip file to create a site, but is geared more towards companies/professionals. Neocities is more geared towards a community of independent creators, though, so I'd rather support/promote them for indie stuff.

That's a cool initiative. The HN in me wants to critique it a bit. Why no markdown or WYSIWYG editor? Is it because that would turn it into wordpress?

I feel like there's a place for a service that can,

* Host static content like netlify/neocities on a CDN

* Allow you to register a domain

* Choose a template and enter content with basic markup

This should be able to be done in < 5 minutes for a non-tech user. You'd think registrars would be incentivized to build such a service.

edit: ~~markup~~ markdown/WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, and so are Markdown ones. The benefit of Markdown is that you just write it in a text editor. You don't need syntax highlighting to use it effectively. Take reddit, as an example, which got millions of people to write perfect Markdown as intuitively as writing English.

I like entering markdown in text editors, it gives me the freedom to format without fighting the editor. A preview panel helps, and yeah reddit demonstrates that people can learn it.

When you say WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, do you mean the idea of it is just bad, or the implementations we've had so far are bad?

If every single implementation we've had so far after all these years is bad, probably the idea itself is too.

It really depends on the editor. Some editors give you raw access to the underlying code and apply styles to it as you type, kind of like syntax highlighting. Some actually try to be rich text editors with a (usually restricted) Markdown input. You can guess which ones make me want to flip a table. (Hint: Slack, fix your editor!)

If you think Slack is bad, try https://github.community/.

> You ranked up to Ground Controller Lvl 1

I hate those undisableable social media accomplishments that come up as notifications, is Github.community based on Discourse or did it just copy their bad ideas?

edit: wow you can disable them in this one, amazing. I still hate it.

i think slack now allows you to disable the visual editor in settings - you can still format with markdown but the formatting isn't rendered until you send.

Yeah but it's half-arsed; specifically, doesn't do [links](...).

that sounds so aggravating. i haven't used slack in years but it sounds like its functionality has taken nothing but steps backwards since then.

but i'm sure they've added cool new react emojis, so i guess they've been pretty busy with that.

I had more or less the same idea, but perhaps with the markdown syntax extended (I understand this is a touchy topic since there are various markdown parsers that don't all work the same) to allow for simple generation of form controls and navigation bars/layouts.

E.g for navigation sidebar:

* [Home](/home)

* [Blog](/blog)

etc

For form controls:

[ ] I'd like to receive marketing emails.

( ) Female

It'd be even better if it can support basic CRUD/BREAD operations. Basic CRUD webapp with just markdown, imagine that.

I think there are several sites that offer such functionality. Squarespace and Wix immediately come to mind due to all of their advertising. There was some other company I used a while back for a small website for an engineering team, but the name escapes me. These sites are perfect for small business and organizations that just need some web presence without having to think through any of the technical side.

Squarespace and Wix both have a monthly fee.

It should be possible to do something like neocities/Gitlab/Netlify with a one-time fee to cover the domain.

Shameless plug, this is what we are offering on https://appdrag.com WYSIWYG editor + Code editor + templates + domains + CLI + much more :)

You mean a WYSIWYG editor? Yeah, they want to encourage individuality, though I guess an HTML editor wouldn't be out of the question (I think kyledrake just hasn't found one he liked).

A “non-tech” user won’t be doing any markup.

I'll second Netlify. Totally fantastic service; I've played with a lot of "github to deployed app" services, and I was still blown away with how straightforward it was to get a NextJS static site on there, auto-deploying, on a custom domain, with site analytics built-in, no code required.

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