Hi Hacker News,

I want to show you something I’ve been working on: MyJekyllBlog.

It’s a multi-user CMS and hosting platform for Jekyll blogs. There is a web application that users can register on, and from that web app they can create Jekyll blogs, manage posts and media. When they make those updates, their blog is rebuilt with the Jekyll and the site is deployed to web servers.

The installation process is codified into the included ansible/ directory and instructions are included in the README for installation. So far I’ve been the only one working on it or installing it, so there is bound to be bugs and things I’ve missed, please feel free to open issues against the repository if you run into anything.

It supports three different user registration modes: open where anyone can sign up for an account, invite where anyone with an invite code can sign up for an account, and stripe where users must use a credit card to subscribe immediately after signing up for an account before they can access the site. You can enable more than one registration mode.

The entire system is open source and MIT licensed, including the installation process, devops tools, and billing code.

Thank you for taking a look!

Interesting idea, however the problem that I see is why pay for jekyll blog hosting when you can host it on GitHub pages or serve via an S3 bucket for free?

Also the people who are using Jekyll are mostly developers or have knowledge in setting up and generating the static files, so majority of the users are comfortable in hosting it on GitHub.

But it's an interesting idea, I wish you all the best.

Those are good points, thank you for the feedback and well-wishes!

There is also a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqcbSr8sJ8

I believe this is the model for taxis -- at least it was about 20 years ago when I worked as a taxi dispatcher in a small town for a short time.

Drivers rented taxis, and the taxi company only made money based on renting out the fleet of cars. It was something like $80 for 12 hours.

Drivers were independent and made money from the customers directly. The drivers I talked to most were a husband/wife pair who rented the same taxi and they told me about having a CPA that wrote off basically everything. Haircuts, clothes, the majority of what they bought was written off their taxes because it was for business.

The dispatcher (what I did) answered the phone and got an origin/destination/name, and radioed drivers until one of them accepted it.

I think the whole operation was a couple dozen cars, a tiny rented building, 3-person rotation of dispatchers, a general manager, mechanic, and an owner.

That's a pretty different model than an LLC where are the individual owns the car. Seems similar where are the LLC gets contracts/ dispatches from a different company

> where are the individual owns the car

You're right -- the city required that taxi cars had medallions to be allowed to pick up passengers, and the one who owned the medallions on cars there was the owner. With a medallioned car you could pick people up in front of bars, night clubs, off a random street corner, etc.

I don't, however see it as any different from an LLC. At the end of the day the taxi drivers worked directly for themselves, had their own clients, optimized for themselves on finding places to get hailed customers. At least the one I talked to about money stuff had their own CPA, if they filed as self-employed or formed an LLC/C-Corp/S-Corp, I don't know. They were paid by people they picked up, directly, rather than the taxi company.

They had a B2B relationship with the taxi stand, they rented a car with a medallion rather than go through the process and cost of buying one, they earned money directly from the people they picked up, making themselves a B2C.

And if you bought a medallion, you didn't need to rent the car from the taxi stand, so you could do it totally yourself and cut them out. You gain maintaining the car, the capital expense of the medallion.

I think we basically agree.

I think this is the better model minus the medallions.

Uber should simply act as a dispatching service, and get a commission for connecting customers to drivers.

Im sure some people will still claim the are expliting the driver LLCs, but at least they wont have to deal with the headache of the contractor/employee debate.

I think in most states a B2B relationship is solid defense against claims that someone is a misclassified employee.

I suppose it really depends on your perspective. It has pure static hosting, in that anything in the public directory is directly served, so static sites that are built with pre-processing have no at-serve-time processing other than the normal web server block.

For files in site/ that end in .md it does do rendering at the point of serving in some situations. Once it does, it both serves the file and spits out an .html file to serve for the next request. The way I thought about it is that the first request for the file generates it — like a mini hugo build or Jekyll build command running for just one path, and only running after a request has been made to it. This makes the compilation of the HTML just in time and saves processing for files that may never be rendered.

It does have draw backs, and could prove not to be the best path, and perhaps the preprocessing isn’t that big of a deal.

Hi! Yes, absolutely. This was supported initially but not communicated well. I hope the updates more clearly explain that.

The use for plain HTML is documented here: https://docs.markdownsite.com/static-site/

I hope this is helpful, thanks!

Hi HN!

Last week I showed you the open source hosting platform I am working on, and got a lot of great comments and feedback.

There was some confusing over exactly what MarkdownSite is, and I made a lot of updates to the site and added a documentation system and blog to more effectively communicate this.

There was also a few issues with things not working out quite as intended with path resolution. A lot of folks who tried to build websites got 404 errors. This has been better addressed now, as well as a bunch of other fixes over the last week.

This blog post intends to make it easy for someone to build their own hosting platform with MarkdownSite. I hope someone finds it useful :)

I have had some success with letting myself be bored. In similar situations, taking that time to lay down on the floor in a random room in the house and look at the ceiling and admit I’m bored. Some idea or fun thing invariably occurs to me eventually.

Random things that could fill this if you’re looking for more hands-on type of things is wood or metal work, designing and building something physical. Bicycle, roller blade and focusing on improving some aspect of it, or walking around outside intentionally observing your surroundings and seeing what you can learn from them. Music, very good keyboards/digital pianos can be had with headphones. Language (verbal/written) learning. Hope this helps!

I've been working on https://markdownsite.com/ - the "Git Repo -> Website" type of hosting platform, and have completely opened sourced it so others can run it themself.

The installation and on-going configuration management are first class things, with documentation and graphs: https://github.com/symkat/MarkdownSite/tree/master/devops

Thank you!

Hi!

I think what happened is you clicked “Build My Site!” without entering a git repository in the text input field.

Right now building sites isn’t private, and there is no authentication, so you could iterate the id numbers, and you could see build logs and from those pages. If a git repository has been used before, instead of building a new website, it brings you to the status panel to rebuild it and it is rebuilt on the same sub domain. That specific one — id 9, looks to be the first time someone clicked the build button without entering any repository, anyone else who does that would be redirected to that page.