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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I'm still using a dynamic blogging engine instead of a static site is that I want to be able to post new articles to my blog, and edit posted articles, using a web browser. The perfect solution, to me, would be a simple site or service with a management interface just like Blogger's or Tumblr's or Posterous's, but that instead of hosting a dynamic blogging engine, simply has a big Commit button that generates a new static copy of the site and writes it to a specified S3 bucket/commits and pushes it as a git repository/whatever else.

Is anyone working on something like this? If not, would anyone else be interested if I scratched this itch?

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That's pretty much what I have. My web site is a static wiki. You pull up the plain text in a web form, make your changes, and hit send. That gets sent in an email to the engine that then regenerates the site, figures out what's changed, and uploads the new bits.

I had to do that because 10 years ago I wanted a wiki, but my host couldn't run cgi scripts. I'm still using it because being a totally static site, it's fast. It doesn't have comments or cross-referencing, and I'm starting to look at alternatives, but it only took a couple of days to write.

Having said that, it works for me, but I doubt it would work for anyone else. It's not flashy enough.

I'm actually working on this, after being inspired by Brett Simmons' article: http://inessential.com/2011/03/16/a_plea_for_baked_weblogs.

My app is pretty similar to what you're describing - you can compose posts online (or in plain text files), and when you're done, it generates a baked (static) version. It's written in PHP, just so you can easily use it on most servers. It's actually pretty close to being done - I can let you know when it's ready.

Isn't this basically the function of moveable type / melody? It's just a big CGI engine that pumps to static content, but is managed pretty much the same way as wordpress UI / concept wise.

I'm working on exactly this but specifically for photoblogs. It will be a hosted service that picks up new photos from a Dropbox directory, generates thumbnails, uploads to S3 and creates a draft post based on the EXIF data. I can then use the web-based admin interface to publish the post on S3 which will do all the heavy lifting of actually serving the blog pages.

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