The blog of Presslabs, a managed WordPress hosting company, with posts on web typography, web design, and its Gitfs project.
HN links it mainly for Gitfs, which mounts Git repos as folders; commenters wanted clearer docs on the main page, and one praises the hosting.
The notion of remote services accessed via local filesystem dynamics is pretty well established. Among implementations:
- NFS, particularly with the Solaris-originated concept of automounts over a /net mountpoint.
- Various virtual filesystems. Midnight Commander ("mc") offers several of these, including archive formats (tar, cpio, afio, rpm, deb) and remote (FTP, SSH).
- SMB/CFS/Samba
- Various FUSE filesystems, including again ssh, ftp, and others. These generally require specifying in advance specific mountpoints.
The notion of on-demand access to remote resources over protocols (e.g., http/https, or others), under filesystem dynamics, is interesting -- you can use any general tool, utility, or application for access, mediated through the filesystem by way of drivers, rather than a specific application (e.g., Web browser, FTP client, etc.)
There are numerous issues. In particular, applications tend not to respond well to remote resources disappearing, changing, or failing to return from change requests -- NFS's behaviour with nonresponsive remote hosts is ... notorious.
Consistency, availability, and partition resistance (CAP) are long-standing concerns, and there's no way to solve for all three. I'd add latency as another major consideration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
The general notion of managing and tracking changes locally, and pushing them to remote, has merits. I'm not aware of a "gitfs" ... though of course, one does exist, TIL: …
While it doesn't seem very popular in Hacker News, I think WordPress [1] is an excellent platform for a blog. The community is terrific, there is a tremendous amount of documentation out there, and it is entirely customisable.
If you go with the managed hosting route, most companies handle security and updates for you, so you can focus on writing and leave everything technical to someone else.
I am working on one myself — and have a private beta running, if you are interested [2], —, but of the top of my head, some companies that will go above and beyond as far as WordPress is concerned, include Kinsta [3], Pantheon [4] and Presslabs [5]. The last one is based in Romania and open sourced a bunch of their stack, worth checking out.
[1] https://wordpress.org
[2] Just email me at help@madpony.co for information
[3] https://kinsta.com
[4] https://pantheon.io
[5] https://www.presslabs.com
sorry, but I wouldn't want to learn from a page looking like that...
I'm no professional, but:
- DONT CAPS MORE THAN 1-2 WORDS
- create clear hierarchy (a list with no real title ("ready? go!"), thin circled numeration and blobs of bigger text without sub-headlines...? Also color is a nice tool to use...)
- stay true to what people know (links have underlines, visited links change color etc.)
- I'd rather have a more raged right margin than having to read "ty-[linebreak]pographer"
- ...
rather go with this first: http://www.presslabs.com/blog/web-typography-for-non-designers/
OK, the main page lacks information.
https://www.presslabs.com/gitfs/docs/usage/
https://www.presslabs.com/gitfs/docs/arguments/
So apparently you can mount remotes, not only local .git dirs. This is really handy and it should be listed on the main page, really.
I raises an other question: can I mount remotes where I don't have write access read-only?
For the directory structure the history directory makes sense for mounted projects that are edited with gitfs. For other projects, not so much. What about having a read only tags/ and commits/ directory too?
I am using http://presslabs.com/ to host two of my blogs, one of them is a tech blog that gets a high amount of traffic every day and there has been no migration or downtime problems so far. I couldn't be happier.
There is an update to the docs on how to install it on OSX: http://www.presslabs.com/gitfs/docs/usage/