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I finally open sourced something: Pliant, a flexible blog skeleton
https://gitlab.com/smoores/pliant
I’ve been a software developer for about three years, and I’ve always been enticed by and passionate about the open source scene. I have an assortment of projects variously available on GitHub and GitLab, but this is the first time I’ve ever created an open source project intended to be used by others.
Pliant is a barebones starter kit for anyone wanting to self host their own blog. It came out of my own efforts to start a blog, and it’s what currently powers https://tfhe.shanemoore.me.
I’d love to hear you’re feedback, or just discuss open source, blogging, web technologies, or whatever else comes up.
Well, I like it. No clutter, easy to customise, probably very handy for small sites/Intranets/people working on something. I downloaded it. Thankee.
Well thanks! Glad to hear it. Would love to know if you ever end up using it for anything!
Give me a week or 2 at the most and I'll tell you.
The first thing that comes to mind is to ask what problem this solves?
There's a ton of static site generators, like Jekyll, which also have the huge advantage that they generate static sites, which do not require a web server.
That’s obviously a fair question. The short answer is, maybe this doesn’t solve a problem that anyone other than me has, and no one uses it, and that’ll sort of be fine. I’m not necessarily trying to push this as the next coming of... anything really. It’s just there in case anyone wants it.
The longer answer is that really I built this with no intention of open sourcing at first, and this was the simplest approach to doing what I wanted. Its less than 100 lines of python, that’s easy to fully comprehend in one sitting, and therefore easy to customize and change. The CSS and HTML are also just small, simple and straightforward, and still very much get the job done of creating a pleasant reading experience.
Maybe the answer is, if this is ever useful for anyone, perhaps it can be an inspiration for how simple hosting your own website/blog/whatever can be. Oooor maybe no one needs that inspiration! :shrug:
Have you used Jekyll? I’ve looked into it but never used it myself, I’d be curious to hear what the authoring experience is like.
Oh, a ton of people have it, it's just that the market (as far as that can be applied to OS, heh) is very saturated here
There's even one in assembly! Although his templates are a little primitive.
and that's totally fair, and that's what 99% of open source projects look like :)
I guess I'm a little more familiar with the "show hackernews" format, where it's a pitch for a product and people provide feedback and poke holes in it. I guess I was somewhat abrasive, sorry!
Wow, yes it is! That's definitely a big plus to this project.
Configuring it to work like I like (tags, syntax highlighting, inheritance of templates) took a bit of time, since it is a significantly more complex program. However, once I did that, the authoring experience is almost exactly the same (putting files in the right place), except that it's possible to use markdown instead of HTML.
Liquid templates are used instead of Jinja 2, but they're almost exactly the same language, except that Liquid is somewhat less powerful.
All good! Totally understand, I am also familiar with that format; that’s why I posted here and not on Hacker News! :D
That list is outstandingly long! Thanks for sending it over, I might poke through some of those and see if anything interesting pops up.
I’d also love to hear if you have anything specific that you think would make sense to have in Pliant that’s not there now!