Hacker News Reader

Comment by thenthenthen | Hacker News Reader

Inspired by Hotglue[1], the opensource content manipulation system thats also self-hostable (duh)?

Hey, Hot Page is my project but somehow I was not aware of Hot Glue. And reviewing it now I would hazard to say the projects are superficially similar. Hot Page is a visual/drag-and-drop web editor that uses no abstractions so the whole time you're using it you have complete control of the resulting DOM (all elements, nesting, attributes, CSS rules, etc). So it's kind of like CodePen but for building real sites. I wrote more about this philosophy here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-abstraction

Yeah, Hot Page, had no clue Hot Glue exists.... Stop lying.

I don't think it is very similar. Personally i thought of HoTMeTaL, an old HTML/page editor that was popular for a little bit during the 90s and had a similar approach of showing the page in a visual quasi-WYSIWYG + quasi-element-tree mode.

Wow, it's been a minute since I used HoTMeTal, I loved that editor. I cranked out a lot of HTML with it, once you got the hang of what it wanted you to do, it would be your best friend. We switched to Dreamweaver, of course that lasted until Adobe bought it. But thanks for the memory, this thread has been the Saturday treat.

Hotglue was the first thing I thought of as well. Truly freeform web design that allowed for custom code and styles via editing the <head> section. Installation for the most part required nothing besides dropping a folder into a PHP-enabled web server.

I wrote a blog post reviewing it a couple of months back: https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web

I read your post at the time and found it really inspiring!

I've been working on my own Hotglue fork to hack in some of the features we were missing like draft pages and responsive "safe areas" like MMM.page.

That's great news! Thanks for taking up the project (and reading my post!). I do webdev as a hobby so unfortunately I cannot contribute to the source code as I don't know enough PHP. The responsive safe zone idea is a great one to implement.

Is it possible to password-protect pages as well? I tried to do it by setting an .htaccess rule for the folder I had them in, but wasn't able to get it to work.

I just tested on my copy and got it to work, but I'm on nginx. I'm sure it's possible with Apache though.

I'm assuming you tried putting something like this in your root .htaccess file (the one that you renamed from htaccess-dist on installation)?

  <Directory "/private-page">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Restricted Area"
    AuthUserFile /.htpasswd
    Require valid-user
  </Directory>

Then you have the .htpasswd file alongside that or in a subdirectory, which contains the username and hashed password.

If that doesn't help, make an issue on my repo and we can work it out there. Today I added password protected pages as a built-in feature, but it would need much longer in the oven before I could suggest switching an existing site over.

https://github.com/ch-rs/hotglue2

Ah, you beat me to it. Looks like a closed source hotglue clone/saas/inspiration. They shouldn't have used that similar name if they're not related to the original project.

Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last years, some friends use it for their personal sites...

or HoTMetaL, or HotDog - both of which were html editors in the 90s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com