Show HN: Git (& Jekyll) backed websites anyone can edit. Beta | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Git (& Jekyll) backed websites anyone can edit. Beta

spintoapp.com

61 pointsmixonic34 comments

1st: Congrats on shipping :)

2nd: Works as advertised! Merging git commits from my machine and editing online (Mercury editor, right?) works fine, see both changes live instantly. Process is really streamlined.

But it's kinda slow, partly I figured that's because you're on HN. But the major advantage of it being statically 'deployed' is that it would be fast. Isn't it deployed on something like S3/Cloudfront?

1st: THANKS :-)

The editor is Mercury with a bunch of bugfixes and additions. That is probably the thing I need to focus on most through this beta period. Polishing Mercury or building something else. I'm involved with the project and have talked to Jeremy a bunch.

The static sites feel slow? They are not on cloudfront right now, that was a bit too much premature optimization. They are on Varnish.

Yep, static sites feel slow, but maybe that's just the geographical distance at play (I'm in Europe).

Any plans on merging those bugfixes and additions back to the Mercury project? :)

Yeah they're all upstream. Jeremy added me as a core contributor on GitHub, I was firing off too many pull requests :-)

I recently made a university CS club website [http://csclubsjsu.com/] using the Jekyll+Github stack. It wasn't using any platform in particular, just a Jekyll project automatically deployed to our server from a Github project using post-commit hooks.

The entire thing took almost no time at all and I've received a lot of positive feedback about being able to edit most pages 'live'.

I'm interested in what you used for live-editing, and whether you think the OP's product would solve any pain for you.

If you visit the site you'll see 'Edit this page' links at the top of each page (sans a few) - go ahead and click it to find out!

As far as the OP's product goes, I think it mainly helps you in the design & layout phase along with the WYSIWYG editor. It's a CS club, so WYSIWYG is not going to be popular, and we already did the design & layout. So I don't think so, but I do see OP's product as an endorsement of the idea.

Ah, I see. I was assuming your solution was also edit-in-place. Still cool though!

Yeah, obviously Jekyll+Github is part of the inspiration here. I love GitHub. I think they are one of the most creative and fantastic companies I have ever seen. GitHub just isn't very layperson friendly though, and I don't see them going there.

It seems that conflicts are handled by "last person" wins.

I created a site and cloned it. I opened a page in the HTML editor. I edited that page in my git clone and pushed. Finally I edited the open page in the HTML editor and saved.

Both edits are in the repo history, but the edit I pushed via git was clobbered with the content saved via the HTML editor.

I assume this is intentional, but it would seem to me that the HTML editor should note the revision which is being edited, and then upon save if a new revision has been pushed behind its back at least inform the user that the page has been changed in the meantime. (Even nicer would be for the HTML editor to notice updates that happen while the page is being edited and pop-up some sort of notice maybe?)

I'm guessing the same thing would occur if two users edited the same page via the HTML editor?

Edit: On second thought, maybe spintoapp handles multiple users correctly and I only observed this behavior because I used the same account for both edits.

Edit 2: There's a broken link on http://www.spintoapp.com/documentation/controlling_editable_... - "You can learn more about fetching changes with Git." links to www.spintoapp.dev.

Right, if you open a page then push a change then save the page, the pushed change will get overwritten. I think the best option to lock during editing might be to just reject the push while the editor is open. Thanks for your thoughts.

And I'll clean up that link!

FYI, the icons (supposed to be next to "Click to edit", "Drag and drop image upload", ...) don't show up correctly on Firefox 11.0 on Windows XP 32 bits.

The symbols instead looks like non-printable characters or something like that

Argh! Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

It might be because they're using Font Awesome for the icons instead of Glyphicons. I don't think the developers are interested in fixing it, though: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/81

I was thinking jekyll could do with a nice web-based frontend for when i just want to quickly write a blog article without spending ages uploading images and re-generating the site. Nice to see someone has a similar idea.

After trying it out for a bit it seems to work fine as a simple jekyll front-end, but it looks very early stages atm. I couldn't figure out how to get the page editor to work properly, and oddly enough there is a separate edit screen for making blog posts which in effect just gives up and leaves you with a basic text box.

Yes, the blogging is very basic. Very, very basic right now. The page editor is my focus because it enables something new, but I do want to flesh blogging out properly before exiting beta.

If you have any other thoughts on what you'd like to see in blogging, do contact me! matt@spintoapp.com

Clicked on create site, got taken to Google accounts. Hit Ctrl+W.

I'd like to be told when I'm about to be sent to a third party site which will try to collect my personal information, thank you.

Me too. I'm A/Bing some language on the main landing button and one version doesn't inform you. Thanks for the feedback!

Oh, and Google is only used for auth. I request nothing but your name and email address, and have no ability to access any additional information from Google.

Technically I like it at lot, I'm looking to build a similar thing but I'm still in the conceptual phase.

I think you should define better your target market to be able to seduce them better, maybe move the 'Try it out' to the top of the screen and talk about some use cases of your target market. I'm just trying to help, I'm sure you know better of your business than me.

There is still much to do on the marketing site, you bet! Email me if you want to talk more about the idea and market: matt@spintoapp.com Talking is always a plus.

Any chance you guys will be doing a wordpress-like thing with this by open sourcing the software and charging for hosting?

Request rejected.

Your request was not processed. The parameters of your request may be incorrect, or you may not have access to this url. If you believe you are arriving at this warning in error, contact support@spintoapp.com.

Howdy there! Thanks for taking a look! I'm not sure what problem you ran into- but do fire off an email telling me what you were doing and I'll figure it out right away: matt@spintoapp.com

Hey there! I believe there was an issue with Google not sending names back for all user. The problem is resolved in Spinto if you want to give it another look. Thanks!

This is a great idea...I use Jekyll for my blog but sometimes wish I could post quickly through my browser. Congrats on shipping!

I have one question: Does a "save" in the online wysiwyg editor trigger a commit+push in the Git repo upstream ?

from my 10 minute experience with the product: yes.

Cool. Really impressed!

Yep! That's a main feature of Spinto. Content editors are brought into the devvy Git workflow.

Thanks for taking a peek!

I already use git pages to host my homepage. Would have been nice to be able to just edit that repo.

Why doesn't GitHub let me edit like that?

How can I edit like that, without a 3rd party?

Honestly I think it's only a matter of time. They have online editing already.

I've been watching for Columnist to have a source code drop. I'm hoping it will be open sourced: http://substance.io/michael/columnist Demo: http://columnist.devseed.com/

It is open-sourced?

https://github.com/substance/substance/blob/master/LICENSE

congrats man, we'll definitely play with it these days.

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