Simple Git-backed Microsites | Hacker News Reader

Simple Git-backed Microsites

petekeen.net

81 pointszrail14 comments

You can also expose the git protocol on your website so that anyone can `git clone http://yourwebsite.com`. It's not the whole solution ; you would need a way to get accept pull-requests and advertise the fact trough an HTML header tag, but it's a start to take back the distributed nature of git.

I would be interested to work on that. If anyone else is, please ping me @zimbatm on twitter or github.

I'm working on something similar, except that it will work the other way round and won't be using git for publishing.

It's a set of scripts that you put on your web server and that pulls the content from a Github repository (or any git repository) by using the Github API (or a limited clone of it provided in the package) and curl.

It's in its early stages. Right now I'm coding a general "library". But i have been using some ad hoc scripts for a few projects during the last year, and I like the way it feels...

Unrelated, but if you're weird like me and was enchanted by the fontface of the site, it's Lora: https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lora

A meta-comment to your unrelated comment - there is a Chrome extension called "WhatFont"[1] that gives you a button you can click, which adds a tooltip to your cursor telling you what font it is hovering over! It's useful to be able to painlessly determine what beautiful font you're looking at :)

[1]: http://chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

Great tip!

Between this and Wappalyser, I'm set.

:) Lora is a great body font. The header font is Lato[1] and the code samples are in Inconsolata[2].

[1]: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato

[2]: http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Inconsolata

Wouldn't simply writing basic HTML be less tedious to set-up microsites ?

What this helps most with is the processes/tedium involved to create a site location and get it up and running online in the simplist way and by doing everything via the user interface.

This is a DIY tool so you can press a button to [Create Website] -> Website live!

Seems like a lot of work and extra tools to implement/learn to publish a simple website. What's the upside?

There's a few upsides. First, it plugs into my workflow really well. If I have some silly idea for a site I can just register the domain name, point it at this app, and drop some content into a text box and it's live, with the possibility of writing content in Markdown, Textile, or any of the other markup languages that Gollum supports.

Second, and really more importantly, it let's my wife easily update pages that she cares about. For example, one of the microsites hosted on there is our wedding website. If she wants to change or add something she can do that without having to muck around with text editors and git and stuff. And if one of us messes up, it's easy to revert back to a previous version, since it's just Git.

One way I did the same kind of thing was have a standard jekyll template and a single git repo. To start a new site I would copy/rename the template folder and go to town. Deployment was as easy as rsync or s3sync via a rake command. Super, duper easy and minimal config.

At some point I could probably automate the config to a shell script, but it was never used on enough sites for that to matter.

Cool! I built something similar like that except I have yet to create a web interface for it and it has much much less dependencies (just really a fancy post-receive for git).

For my own use I just like to have a git push to deploy. A web interface could be useful for others, which I will build eventually.

Plug: https://github.com/shuhaowu/gioku

Neat! I like it.

Really, the web interface is just to make it easier for me to create sites and for other people to edit them. I'm not finding myself spending a lot of time in the web editor.

This is awesome!

Any possibility you could add a few more details to your README on getting everything running and trying this out locally.

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