JustWriting – Markdown blog system | Hacker News Reader

JustWriting – Markdown blog system

github.com

22 pointssebgeelen20 comments

I like the philosophy behind Markdown: you write a simple text file and this is your article. If you want, you can fire up `pandoc` and convert it to HTML to make a nice website. Then, make it a PDF for constant rendering.

I personally started using Markdown as well for my website. I have a simple Makefile that finds `*.md` files and convert them to HTML using pandoc with some custom options. I can edit files very simply with vim instead of an online editor bloated with Javascript.

My blog is Markdown + a bunch of custom filters that adds things like syntax-highlighting, and inline conversion of Graphviz diagrams to either inline SVG or a linked image.

I don't think I'll ever go back to a "full-featured" blog platform - the convenience of having a git repo that is 90% just the article text, with a sprinkling of code for rendering that I can trivially augment to add shortcuts if/when I feel like it, is very pleasing.

Do you convert graphviz diagrams client or server side? ...I'm thinking of going mathjax style client side (for the convenience) with https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js/, if I ever need it. (I'm making yet another static site gen...)

I have a hard time understanding someone starting a new PHP project in august 2014 and choosing CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter is indeed not the best choice - Laravel or Symfony would of been a better choice. However, some people can build faster with CodeIgniter - it has a lower learning curve & some people can just work faster with it.

I am actually currently hacking up a proof of concept in CodeIgniter - will definitely replace it however with a different framework in the near future. For a project like this however, open sourced and aimed for people to use for production, a different framework choice would of indeed been nicer.

This seems perfect for all my non-technical friends who want to blog. Maybe a local WYSIWYG text editor that converted to markdown would be the perfect complement for anyone who doesn't know it already. That, or maybe they should just learn markdown haha.

WYSIWYG can be counter-intuitive. I would prefer a large textarea for entering Markdown and a live preview aside (like the Reddit Enhancement Suite does).

A good think with Markdown is that learning can be incremental: at first, you just write some text. Later, with the preview, or with a short guide always displayed under the textarea, you learn that you can do some formatting.

On the other hand, people using WYSIWYG will go the other way: the will first see they can do a lot of stuff, and later get confused when stuff does not behave in the expected way.

What about using a program for that like iA Writer on the Apple platform, which than is synced via Dropbox to that server?

In fact I am using that, but with a different Markdown blogging plattform. ;o)

I've been using Dillinger.io a bit for that, but really what I would like is to be able to do that in ST3 native.

I heard Atom.io already does that, but I haven't been able to get it running on my laptop, and npm just keeps littering my filesystem with its `node_modules' directories.

You/they might be interested in WardrobeCMS as well, it's a pretty nice markdown editor. http://wardrobecms.com/

Kirby CMS [1] has a nice admin interface:

[1] https://github.com/bastianallgeier/kirbycms

How does this compare to http://calepin.co/ ?

and also http://visual-marks.com?

Well, it would appear to be more like stripped down Pelican https://github.com/getpelican

(And yes, calepin is in fact a service that is built using Pelican as the backend.)

Here is a great list of a bunch of open source static site generators - some geared toward blogs and some to generic sites:

https://www.staticgen.com/

(not my project, just a happy user)

I like this list as well: http://staticsitegenerators.net/

You've missed the point.

The purpose of this project is NOT to be a static site generator, but to be a dynamic site generator.

The only step in your content creation should be the addition of the md file to the posts directory. No running "make" or "update" or using git/rsync/symlinks to move static html to a web directory.

The blog is made live by PHP every time someone visits it.

Im happy with https://github.com/blogist/blogist using gist as backend i can even use org mode to write blog

Hahaha. I've been writing this exact thing myself on-and-off for the last couple of weeks. This does literally everything I wanted my own project to do. Oh well.

Compare to Prose https://github.com/prose/prose:

- uses Jekyll. CMS-free. Does blogging. also Markdown based, but additionally supports HTML formatting

- host your own web server, or use GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is for free and you get GitHub's superb traffic capacity and uptime. https://pages.github.com

- GitHub instead of Dropbox for storage, collaboration and versioning

- host your own Prose instance, or use http://prose.io

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