Came here to say this. Can't see any kind of mission statement other than there is a membership list and they committed to open source discussion.
2,270 karma · joined May 22, 2009
You can find more info about me on my website https://davesnider.com
Can contact me dave.snider [at] gmail.com
Happy to answer any questions you have about our system. I'm mostly a designer, so heads up for when you're asking deep technical questions!
I wrote up a tutorial here if you're interested in search on static sites.
http://www.webhook.com/blog/tutorial-add-search-to-your-stat...
I can't say enough good things about them. And remember, the output is all static, so it's not like you'll be hitting expensive limits from Firebase. We only use them on the CMS site. So unless you plan on having 100 people in your CMS at once you'd be fine with their free plan.
The self-host docs come out next week. It's working, we're just testing and documenting everything as best we can.
We've been open sourcing the entire thing under an MIT license. The server layer is the last bit and will be available next week.
Specifically anyone coming from a Django / Twig background will probably love our template layer.
/me Looks around and notices that I'm a designer.
OK. Proposition. I've always wanted to a really nice tutorial / guidebook for Vim. I however, am not someone familiar with the guts of Vim, Vimscript and mostly just implement packages and pick up stuff as I go. If there is a coder-type person out there that is interested in working on the more technical bits, I'd be happy to style up the documents and make it presentable. I have experience writing, making videos and styling technical docs. You can see my work at http://www.webhook.com
Also, I should say I don't think this FAQ is a good intro to Vim. I think a better way to do it would be to present a chapter by chapter guide that gives people very easy earlier wins. To me, that means you focus on package installation and configs first, and then start working on movement and more advanced packages. Get people hooked on customization first, because the movement stuff takes weeks of brain training. At the end of the day I love Vim because I can make it whatever I want.
I'd consider myself an expert at CSS, at a level where I can and have built very large frameworks with deep mixins, extends and variable use in Sass that need to be used across multiple projects.
I know the basics of Javascript, mostly around JQuery and setting up things like Grunt and Bower. The types of actions this framework solve are too low level even for me. As you mentioned earlier, I can copy paste or lookup any onclick or toggle events, which are about 90% of all display side JavaScript. Add this class, remove this class... etc.
What this article somewhat mentions and what seems really weird for people that like Pen and Paper and want to play this new edition is that they are releasing the CORE books over the span of a few months. It's kind of weird for players. Sure we get the Player's handbook this Tuesday, but without a DM book and a Monster Manual it makes things a little limited for a few months.
A decent portion of the core audience moved on to Pathfinder and feel pretty comfortable there. It'll be interesting to see if this push can sway us back.
The key part of course is you don't NEED to change. A lot of people still stick to old versions. I play once a month with a group of 5 others. It'll take us a couple years just to get through our current campaign in Pathfinder. Moving to 5E right now will just be a curiosity.
http://dnd.wizards.com/sites/default/files/media/DnDBasicRul...
This place is insane. I moved to sleepy Petaluma an hour north and have no regrets.
If anyone is interested I recently launched http://www.webhook.com as a way to have both words. Data is stored in a Firebase so you get clean JSON data so that you don't need to deal with all the bloat for simple content sites. We're currently cleaning the code up and will have it all open sourced by the end of August.
Out of curiosity does anyone know of a similar service for Google Cloud Storage? Really bums me out that they don't break out bandwidth per bucket.
Yes, we think there's probably a separate product there as well. I'd always wanted to do something like the formbuilder but was usually trapped in more traditional dbs. Always got hung up on how you'd handle data migrations and the like. Moving to Firebase and working with essentially a string database in JSON really opened that side up. The only bummer is that we basically have to do lots of clean-up anytime there is relational data (which we allow through the system).
Saves to that CMS, which is hosted statically, then send a build notification to our node based build servers, which then regenerate new static html files (from template you deployed to us) and send them to the proper place. Indexing and SEO are then just as they are for any other static site.
In local development, this is done through simple watch commands in Grunt, similar to what you'd see in something like Jekyll.
Bower is fantastic for dependency management. This is apparent as soon as you use it to manage the reqs for your project, but becomes even more awesome when you start publishing your own code, even if it's something not many other people use. Right now I have a bootstrap like Sass framework that I built and use between five or six projects. Not too big, but each one of those projects is pretty popular and actively edited. I needed a way to make sure everything updated well and could be temporarily stalled while I worked on better releases. Bower does all that.
Grunt is just my workhorse. Bower may install my files, but I need them moved around into certain folders in my project. Grunt handles that with a line or two. I also use it to watch my sass files and rebuild my static sites when changes to the templates or JS files occur. Since I publish some of my code to github I have grunt commands to auto tag and version my git repo and build, merge and publish a gh-pages branch so my documentation is kept up to speed. It also minifies whatever files I need minified/uglified and adds some license and documentation to the top of the files.
Almost all of these things I used to do manually or hand separate processes for.
1. The name. I bought the domain over a year ago. The term wasn't as popular then. Originally the plan was to have the system auto-build after certain external hooks triggered. We still plan to do this and thought it was worthwhile using the name. It's a v1.
2. Funded through Kickstarter. We raised $40k through Kickstarter and are bootstrapped entirely. I plan on writing a blog post on the pros and cons of raising money this way.
3. We have plans to open source everything under MIT. It's three of us, so we wanted to get the product out first. We're now moving to documenting / refining the code to a level we're happy with so we can release it. It doesn't just run on a single server, so we're trying to figure out elegant ways to make it easier to install.
It works mostly as a simple Grunt JS (node) project. We use firebase as a data store and talk to everything through a single page cms.html ember app. That means the actual CMS is realtime, which makes it fun when multiple people are in the CMS as the same time. It also means that we can update the entire CMS by deploying JS files, which makes maintenance on our end pretty easy. "Bug is fixed, just refresh".
We use websockets locally for installing / generating files on the fly through browser actions. Once deployed, we watch for saves and rebuild the sites through remote servers. Search is handled through a hosted Elastic search instance. The goal was to remove as much of the local setup as possible and offload it to us. That means that it only works when you're connected to the Internet. Image resizes can be called at the template layer at will.
We made it after loving working with things like Jekyll and Cactus but hated that we couldn't use it for sites where there needed to be non-coding editors. Even with all the moving parts, it deploys dumb static sites, because we wanted reliability and speed. Also, having worked on complicated Django projects for the last decade I just wanted something that was a relatively one line install.
If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know.
It's a logical idea, but I've never seen ATMs and bitcoin really working well together.
We're launching later this week, but I can sneak you in early if you'd like. Just send an email to dave@webhook.com
Here's the problem. When every action you get paid for is a metric, it forces those metrics to eventually be corrupted. Need CPM eyeballs? We solved that one decades ago... link rings. Today's link ring is outbrain, nrelate and the rest. Here, we'll put web sugar on our pages with bikinis and top 10 lists. Eyeballs you have. Doesn't matter that the site sells itself as a tech magazine, it's real traffic is comic con photos of Jean Grey. No one will know.
Maybe you get paid for clicks. OK. We have solutions for that too. Let's put adwords in the page. Let's style them to look like navigation. Let's create popovers with super tiny close buttons that purposefully have their display and href off by a few pixels. Let's delay it to load so that we can likely grab a rogue accidental click as well. Smaller screen, less precision as you do in mobile? Perfect, even better. We'll autoplay movies one after the other, but only if we have an ad. There's a system to all of this.
Then of course you run into the engineers and executives that simply don't care. The Internet to them isn't the democratization of knowledge, it's an opportunity. "People want to click on Bikinis, why do you care". The problem of course is ads become a pattern. Once one large site falls into selling a certain system, the rest fall like dominos. Because the ad providers aren't going to create unique ads per site.
Meanwhile I was building very genuine, audience driven sites that were doing a hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly, believe it or not, DIRECT traffic. It doesn't matter. You can't compete with 10s of millions from link arbitrage, 99% referral traffic. You're not a big site. You don't matter. Sure we'd get hundreds of real comments and discussion per story, but there's only three-hundred thousand people on the site, who cares.
The problem of course is this is just as big a problem for the content producers themselves. They go to work day to day and get beaten over the head to make cheap, quick content that attracts the most viewers. The shotgun approach, something will hit. For the first couple years they fight it out, but eventually they give up too. It's easy.
There are companies solely dedicated to this. They create cheap content with little or no value, a getty image subscription, and siphon links from larger, less valuable networks like yahoo and aol. They pay 1 cent for the link and charge 2 for the ad. These quick, pop-up sites feature some sort of vertical branding (cars, babies...etc) and sell their growth to unknowlegable ad-buyers. Look, we're a brand new car site that's getting 2 million uniques a day!
It's depresses me sometimes. It was hard to work around that kind of scam and not dip to those levels. The pressure is always immense. If you just use such and such dark pattern, you can solve all your problems.
I really hope things like Patreon work out. I'd love to see people paying for smart content. It's needs to be easier than it is.
It's of course not all bad. On the positive, small scale publishing by the individual is as healthy as ever. A good quarter of the links you'll read on this page today are on somebody's blog, containing no ads and featuring real, genuine ideas and knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGSIf1KXGHs
For those that miss the reference.
It's very easy for me to understand the anger. But my pessimism makes me skeptical of yet another political group asking for money to change politics.
I was very disappointed that their website homepage really didn't list any of the details or the specifics, it just detailed the anger. It also had the usual array of celebrity endorsements around that anger. I dunno, at its face this looks very similar to the splinter group party stuff on both sides.
Again. I'm just not someone super versed on this stuff and am looking for info. What makes this different and why will this work?
I'd equate it more to using your mouse for everything in photoshop or spending the time to learn that V selects the arrow key, and G selects the paint bucket.
Once you learn vim commands it's more a problem of using regular text fields (like the one I'm commenting in now). Right now I really want to use Vim key commands, and have to tell myself to Shift-left to get to the beginning of this line.