Show HN: Review my project: Git Code Press, blogging via git | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Review my project: Git Code Press, blogging via git

gitcp.com

31 pointssorenbs32 comments

Why would I use this over blogger or even just gh_pages? Why .textile, is that file magical? What if I want two blog entries? Can I have each blog entry its own folders? What about other markup? Is http://gitcp.com/sorenbs/jsgames-articles an example or something unrelated that you did and just linking to?

The image fails in your test: http://gitcp.com/sorenbs/Git-Code-Press/markup-test

Rather than four hands showing you what to do having the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 as circle dots or something would be more clear.

How do I customize the header/footer?

Thank you for some great questions. First, it is probably not completely clear, but the links at the bottom is a list of existing blogs. At the moment there are 2 :-) jsgames-articles is the project i was working on when i realised i had to create this git-powered blogging system. Now that it is ready, i can get back to work.

I find Blogger and the other online wysiwyg style systems to be too much of a hazzle to work with. I wasn't aware of github pages, but it looks really nice. I will probably find some inspiration there. From what i can tell github pages lets you create an arbitrary website structure with arbitrary styling, whereas the goal with gcp.com is ease of use and a nice standard layout (sort of like latex). That is also why i haven't added header and footer support, but i should probably make some minimal customaization available, like name and tagline.

.textile is sort of a convention for files with textile markup. I could add support for other markup formats. What would you suggest?

What I meant by the .textile is that on the site you shouldn't say 'push a .textile", you should say "push a *.textile such as foo.textile" I read it such that the file name had to be ".textile" which made me wonder how you would have more than one post.

"I find Blogger and the other online wysiwyg style systems to be too much of a hazzle to work with" Can you be more specific? blogger lets you go to plain text editor and not use the wysiwyg so that is a moot point. I have issues with blogger, but that isn't what I would pick on.

I thought that push a .textile was pretty clear.

Ahh, i see. I have tried to make it a bit more clear. Perhaps i should put a link to a github repo to make it easier to understand the structure.

What i believe gitcp.com does better than blogger is this: No need for a web interface (might be negative for some); textile markup is much easier to write than html or using some gui editor, and gives a much nicer result than raw text; syntax highlighting of code snippets (this is the primary use case for me).

Even knowing that the links at the bottom of the page are blogs that are already using your thing, "Code Collections" makes no sense as a header. None. How about "Latest blogs powered by Git Code Press"?

Absolutely.

I love it, but it has still quite some room for improvements.

From a blog I expect at least an RSS feed of posts, a publishing date on each post, and comments.

You could also embrace the possibilities of git, and for example provide previous versions of blog posts, or even highlight differences between versions.

Similar project of mine, but which is "blogging using only git" rather than "via git": http://gitorious.org/fugitive

Example blogs: http://shebang.ws/, http://a3nm.net/blog/, http://vlog.antonin.delpeuch.eu/ :-).

That is very clean. I like the way you embrace git and integrate deeply with its features. I will have to copy some of that :-)

:-). You should also have an rss feed generated, without that a blog is not that useful IMO.

First, I love the idea and I'm looking forward to use it. The only thing I wasn't sure while looking at the "landing" page was: "Where is the blog hosted? Does it go to: gitcp.com/<my-name> ? or in the hook I can specify my domain? Or..? Otherwise, well done sir.

Thank you. The blog is hosted at gitcp.com/user/repo. I think it is a great idea to support custom domains. I could give every blog a subdomain and that way you could set your DNS up with a cname record pointing directly to it.

Yeah, definitely. The other thing I was wondering is "Whatsup with the css and page design?" It seems like you are using inline style in your examples but is there a way to have my own css? And also, does the posts create a "standard html" markup?

As you can see, I find there are a couple of unanswered questions. Maybe you could add a simple FAQ or something :) Still, the landing page does a great job at picking someone's interest, so good wok for that.

My idea is to have a very simple system where you only have to think about the content, and the presentation stuff "just works". Do you think that custom css/templating is a must-have feature?

I'm glad you like the landing page. I have added an example showing the markup that generated the frontpage. Hopefully that will make it more clear how the system transforms textile into html.

Yeah, I really like how simple it is but I think being able to write the css is important. Still, if the generated HTML is standard, it could be something really simple.. i.e. automatically include the style.css.

The "result" link goes to: http://localhost:8080/sorenbs/jsgames-articles/spritemap-til...

Thank you for catching that :-)

Looks intriguing, but you may want to provide some more documentation for it. If I was to choose a git-workflow based blogging system I would lean toward toto, simply because I can understand it better (theres some good documentation and articles on it.)

Nonetheless, the result looks nice :)

Cool. I didn't know about toto, but it appears that there are quite a few git based blogging systems out there. Do you know any (besides github pages) that are hosted? The few i have looked at all require you to run your own server.

What kind of documentation would you like. A tutorial or rather a complete documentation of the markup?

UNRELATED: I've been taking a look at Review HN posts lately and realized that there are increasingly few. Are they getting buried under all this bubble news? or are fewer and fewer people pushing new startups?

Great Idea. Are you trying to make it as painless as possible? If so, you could autogenerate an index and a backlink on each blogpost then that would take the hassle of keeping links up to date.

I just got an OutOfMemory exception

Thanks for alerting me. I guess i have a memory leak to hunt down :-)

Thank you all for comments and questions. That have been extremely helpful.

What a coincidence, I'm working on the same thing (more or less).

Great. I hope you will send me a message when you have something ready @sorenbs

Great idea! But I think you meant hot "off" the press.

Will you write how this works or release the source?

I suspect that it is the github integration you are interested in? The post-receive hook generates a post request with json-formatted data about the commit. See http://help.github.com/post-receive-hooks/

When i receive such a request i use the object api http://develop.github.com/p/object.html to get a list of files in the repo, and then fetch *.textile and .png files which are new or have a new hash. I don't use their libraries, i just consume the rest interface directly.

I store the files in mongodb together with some metadata, and for processing i use a nice scala web framework called liftweb. For textile parsing i use http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/ And for code formatting i use google-code-prettify

Anything else?

Also add MathJAX so that latex works. Good job!

Wow, that is amazing. Will definitely have to play with that.

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