Just curious on when you would use this over GitHub Pages?
If you’ve used and like GitHub Pages, and are just going to host a website as quickly as possible, it’s probably going to be the better option for you. GitHub can host the website, and GitHub Pages has better documentation and support than MarkdownSite does. MarkdownSite would likely be the bad choice right now for this. It launched literally last night, and I am hoping to get enough traffic and feedback from people playing with it so I can see where I can improve it.
If you want to run your own version of GitHub Pages, and host the website on virtual machines or bare metal servers in a data center, and to then provide that hosting to others, I don’t believe GitHub Pages has any self hosting option that I could see. If that’s true, MarkdownSite would be the better option in that situation.
On a personal note, it is perhaps an incredibly self-indulgent project in that I’ve always simply liked web hosting technology. I want to share that by creating and running a hosting platform myself, and to have the code and documentation and network diagrams out in the open for it so anyone else can run their own too.
I hope this helps explain some of the rational, thanks for checking it out!
Currently, I have a static blog served @ [0] and it is literally a git repo that runs git hooks. I think the project you're doing is awesome, but it would be nice if it could be tuned, e.g. choose my markdown processor of preference, etc.
the git repo for the blog is here: [1]
My blog uses a forked tool called blogit (made by pedantic.software) and it's makefiles and a standard markdown processor with raw html templates for headers, footers, etc.
I haven't actually used this but I think it's promising: (mkws.sh) [2]
just spitballing some ideas here and there. Nice project.
references
[0] https://trevcan.duckdns.org/blog/
[1] https://git-trevcan.duckdns.org/trevcan.github.io.git/
[2] https://mkws.sh/
There is some support in there for build-time changing of things. A file, .markdownsite.yml, can be read in and do things like change where the directory containing markdown files, or the webroot is, and will switch branches. Definitely a place that could be expanded — if you take a look at Manager/lib/MarkdownSite/Manager/Plugin/Maker.pm you’ll see how it builds. So maybe some of that can fit in, and alternative builders are certainly something to think about.
As far as git hooks, right now, you could add one to make your site import with the following:
A githook could trigger an import with curl, for example:
curl -XPOST -d'repo=git@github.com:symkat/mds-example.markdownsite.net.git' https://markdownsite.com/import
The first run will make the site and assign a domain, subsequent runs update the same domain.
Thanks for checking it out and your feedback, definitionally given me some things to think about!
You are not alone! :-)
Also, thank you for making this!