Cactus for Mac – A fast, easy and free static site generator | Hacker News Reader

Cactus for Mac – A fast, easy and free static site generator

cactusformac.com

168 pointsgprasanth40 comments

Maker here. This is a nice UI based on the open source: https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus/tree/v3

We decided to make it free to fully focus on http://framerjs.com, out prototyping tool: http://cactusformac.com/blog/posts/cactus-and-glueprint.html

I am a customer that bought this app (the UI version) back when it used to cost ~20EUR. After checking the open source command-line project, I decided I don't want to mess with installing Python packages and so on so I got it from the AppStore. The easy install process was a major selling point in contrast with other available tools too (e.g. I don't want to interact with Haskell at all).

On a technical level, I was quite happy with the app, but the fact that it was made free is disappointing, because unless it will be open sourced it means it's pretty much dead. Even then I will probably have to do a lot more work to upgrade. What are your plans regarding that?

Hi there,

I see GZIP optimization and fingerprinting in your deployment overview on the homepage, but do you include any built-in support for avoiding render-blocking CSS and JavaScript? And if so, then what about handling load order and dependencies between the asynchronously loaded pieces?

It looks like your homepage actually fairs pretty poorly on PageSpeed Insights:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

I realize PageSpeed scores can be something of a red herring in a lot of cases, and I'd like to know if you think it's not worth addressing. I know for my place of work, if it influences SEO to any significant degree, then it's important to my boss.

Currently we use Middleman, which from the description I saw of Cactus, would be the Ruby equivalent using Sprockets and Padrino instead of Django. We had to make a custom template with special helpers to address various PageSpeed issues. It'd be nice to have a tool that has features addressing these things out of the box though.

Anyway, great work! I think tools like this are really the future as far as content on the web is concerned.

Is the Mac app going to be open source too? (I'm not saying it has to be, just curious to find out what your thoughts are on that.)

If the code were released, it could be ported to other platforms. I've done a bunch of Cocoa -> Windows ports in the past using Cocotron and it works, albeit usually with a lot of manual tweaking on the AppKit level.

It looks like Cactus is no longer available on the Mac App Store. Any reason why you took it down as opposed to simply making it free there?

Save $100/yr?

Hey, nice work. After years of avoiding "this web thing" :) I've recently started using Jekyll and GitHub Pages; I'm pretty happy with what I've learned and done so far, and since these are my foundations, I have to ask: Can you compare and contrast Jekyll and Cactus? Thanks!

The mac only stuff is a real turn-off. It might be informative to look at the website visitor statistics to see the piece of the pie you're missing.

>The mac only stuff is a real turn-off. It might be informative to look at the website visitor statistics to see the piece of the pie you're missing.

And a SUV car maker is missing on selling sportcars and trucks. Not to mention he could be selling hamburgers and get a slice of McDonald's pie.

Wanting to make software for platform A doesn't imply you want to make software in general. Some people get into software development because they like a particular platform/niche and it's APIs, tooling etc and want to create programs for that.

Different perspective: Mac-only is a very attractive feature for some people. I blog infrequently, and only ever do it from one of my Macs. A solid, native Mac-only app is the only way to make the best possible app of this kind for OS X.

So for me, and others in similar circumstances, it is actually a very attractive feature (and the thing that made me click through to see what Cactus is all about).

I don't care about blogging from Windows or Linux, since I don't ever do that.

(I do care about open source, though, so I would encourage the authors to open source the whole app, if at all possible.)

EDIT: Hmm, but after playing with it I see that this tool doesn't actually provide native editing, which is the part where a native OS X app would be the most useful. This tool just kicks you out to your text editor to actually edit content. (I was thinking it would be something more like MarsEdit, but instead of publishing to one of the blog services, published to a static blog.)

Don't know if your current demography actually take into account your point of view, many things kill a app but nothing kill it faster than assuming that you and your audience are on the same page. A example, would be me.

Maybe you're not the maker's target demographic. Not being a Mac user, for example.

It's frustrating to try a static site generator that doesn't just spit out a directory I can upload to a webhost. Why all the required Amazon integration?

It does. Check the .build folder for uploadable files to any host.

Indeed it does, but IMHO it could do it more openly (i.e., provide easier access directly from the app itself).

Must be something in the water. I'm working on something similar I hope to release early this year that should work cross platform. My plan was to build it as a self-hosted web app, so all the editing happens in the browser, but trigger commands that eventually generate the static site, and help with deploying. See you in show HN in a few...

I'm working on a static site generation web app as well, although mine won't be self hosted. Good luck to you! For me it was a convergence of: 1) Outstanding cost/benefit of static file serving. 2) Current static site solutions being too complicated for most end users. 3) Bloated content management system alternatives.

I took it for a spin and enjoyed it. It would be even more awesome if there was a deploy to Github pages that was as easy as the AWS deploy.

It would be great if you could deploy this as easily in places other than AWS.

You can, you can directly upload the contents of the .build folder to any host.

That's what open source is for, my friend!

So I wrote a 2 liner plugin that replaces .html with no extension, with the idea that I could upload them to s3, but facing the following problems:

- server doesn't deliver the file with the right mime-type. - uploading to s3 doesn't yield the right mimetype either, I have to manually set them.

Can Cactus deal with either of these?

Edit: okay, so put prettify: true in config.json, and it generates directories with index.html in them for directory urls. Neat. I don't really want dir/ urls, but it'll do.

I wrote a static, static site generator called "Jr" (https://github.com/Xeoncross/jr). There really is nothing you need to do but write your posts. The client's browser renders the whole site when it's requested.

There is nothing to install, nothing to setup, nothing you have to generate. I don't know how to make it simpler and yet still self-hosted.

I have personally used in the past Fenix - http://fenixwebserver.com/

It's very easy to deploy sites and even runs http://localtunnel.me/ to share your locally hosted site over the web.

Shameless Plug: I built a simple app which allows creating/managing and hosting static websites using Dropbox: http://www.websrvr.in/ It minifies and gzips all your html, js and css too.

The video demo[1] makes it look like this is a command line template generator? Be great to have some additional information about what this tool does and how it does it.

[1] http://vimeo.com/46999791

Cactus is a static site generator. That is a video about the command line version. The site and docs should do a pretty good job at explaining. Or just download it and check it out for yourself.

Is there an open-source replacement for Dreamweaver that's any good? There have been many attempts, but few have both a good WYSIWYG editor and site-maintenance capability. Many have some strong bias towards some template system, not raw HTML5.

Not open-source, but http://macaw.co/

I'm curious as to why this project is using Django templates (as opposed to Jinja2)? Django is a heavy dependency if you're just planning on using Django templates. Also, from what I've read, it appears that Jinja2 is more extensible.

I like this app very much but only used it during the trial. (It was a bit expensive imho.) It is nice to see that is open source now. Really hoped this would be the next iWeb successor. I dint know about framerjs; it looks neat!

Cool app, is there something similar for Windows? Frequently people ask me for simple web editing software...

Why would someone want to use this instead of jekyll or similar?

Not all people are comfortable with a terminal window you know...

just an opinion: i really don't want to tie my site with an os x-only app.

for these geeky people to tinker with static site, i think they would prefer actively developed, unix-friendly tool.

but what do i know, i'm just one person.

This appears to be a GUI on top of an open-source Django-based tool. I haven't tried it on any platform, but only the GUI is OS X-only as far as I can tell.

There are more static site generators now then you could ever evaluate in a lifetime. So if one is OSX specific, I don't think that's a big deal.

For what it's worth I like Wintersmith (http://wintersmith.io) for a command line, UNIX friendly generator. It's built on NodeJS.

Agreed, but, arguably, it is not the app which would trap you, but the file format.

If a static site generator took as input, say, a collection of markdown files, with maybe some metadata in the filenames and directory structure, along with a single plaintext configuration file, it would be easy to move between different solutions, so it would be less configurable, than, say Jekyll, but easier to move to something else. I do not know if such a thing exists at the moment, but would be interested if someone does.

It's available on UNIX systems from the CLI, and is open source: https://github.com/koenbok/cactus

Cool then. I didn't know about this.

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