Specter – A minimal, elegant and free Markdown-enabled blogging platform (opens in new tab)

Oh look another great free tool and another senseless comment that tries to knock it for no reason. You're just writing over-generalized nonsense for the sake of it, most of which doesn't even make sense...

> Is it okay if I keep writing post in HTML, rather than REST?

What?

Writing a blog engine has been the "hello world" for new languages / web frameworks for a while.

I switched to a static site generator from Posterous when it was acquired (and ultimately shut down), and I definitely do find myself writing more posts on the blog. Writing a post is as easy as creating a new markdown file, writing in it, then `middleman build`, `git commit -a` and `git push` (which I could definitely automate further).

Of course, I probably consider this workflow easier because as a developer I'm already perfectly comfortable with git, and with working with source files. I can just open a terminal and type `vim /path/to/blog/new-post.markdown` and start writing. I find Wordpress slow, fiddly and limiting by contrast.

I'm not uncomfortable making the extended inference that most who prefer markdown for posting are at least very computer-literate and quite possibly software developers. I tried to sell my wife (a writer) on markdown and she didn't get it at all.

Well, it's up to you to use your own gym membership. If you sign up and don't use your membership, that is ultimately your problem. These new blogging platforms are like different gyms you can sign up for. Whether you exercise or not, at least do it at a gym you like.

I think it's nice to see a variety of self-made blogging platforms come around. Not only do we bloggers get our pick of the litter but it shows how some languages/frameworks work in creating something conventional like a blog. I agree that is seems to have become some sort of rite of passage.

I realise you're being snarky, but of course it is. Do what makes you happy. For an increasing (but numerically very small) amount of people, building their own service is what makes them happy.

In terms of awesome features - well yes. There are tons and tons and tons that are available from pages dynamically generated by a server-side program that would be a real pain to produce on manually updating HTML pages.

I think it's the new todo list.

I have a question...

>Specter takes the elegant/lazy approach of not using sessions at all - access to edit and create pages is entirely via url, and permission to actually perform those changes is granted by including a 'secret' (a password) in the form. It's not the most secure form of defense (I'm not using ssl, so a wireless sniffer could easily determine my password, for example), but its sufficient for a nonprofessional.

Is there something that I can do to make it more secure but still follow the lazy approach. I am asking cause I use heroku which is not secure as well.

Why thank you sir for this detailed write up! You did a great job.

Interesting: Use my blog platform! Here is the code!

https://github.com/brislink/specter

Sorry about that. There is only so much that I can write on a project page. It has to grab attention.

I wrote in detail about specter and what I learnt building it on my blog, if you care to read you can go on the link below.

http://www.staticshin.com/tag/specter

With WordPress, there's always the possibility of your blog being hacked, because it executes queries and there's always the chance for bugs to exist some where in the huge ocean of code. On the other hand, with static blog generators (like specter, octopress, pelican, etc) your generated blog will be static html and as far as I know, there's no way you can really question html's security, simply because security doesn't apply to it. You cannot attack html because it doesn't run queries or anything, it's just static data being pulled from the server and displayed by the browser. So, in the end, the security goes back to your host and how good the machines are configured (when you're using shared hosts).

Static engines: * Do one thing _good_ (i.e. blog) * Fewer lines of code, which means: * Easier to maintain * Easier to read * Easier to customize using small chunks of raw code

Dynamic engines: * Do many things (i.e. having multiple authors, multiple formats, visual editors, plugins, etc.) * Many more (as in x^5) lines of code, which means: * * Harder to maintain * * Easier to use for _non programmers_ * * Easy to customize SOME things (apply a theme), HARD to customize the whole thing properly (you need to read huge chunks of code that might break if you change them) --

The above reasons make Wordpress pretty much insecure compared to a Static website (i.e. Jekyll engine like octopress). Of course you could have a bloated wordpress websites where all it's plugins are revised and secure while you could have a static website where it's running buggy JavaScript which reveals your IP to the NSA (random example pick) but the % of having a bug in a bigger (in terms of lines of code) app is way higher.

You mean the the themes? Well I just added them to demonstrate that all you need to is change the css from boostrap to bootswatch in order to change the theme.

http://bootswatch.com/

The most important one to me is not using PHP (THEshittiest programming language ever) and being built upon NodeJS. Also, look at my answer below about the security aspect of it.

It's not built-in out of the box, so you gotta ask the developer about it. But you should be able to easily use it by adding the js files to your header.

Well I have never worked with MathJax but from the cursory glance it looks like all you need to do is add js files and you can do that in specter.

It is already built into specter. Use the urls

/feed/rss and /feed/atom

So all you got to do is add an anchor tag that points to these urls.

Settings can be set in the preferences file.

Regarding syntax highlighting...

Can you not use javascript libraries to do this? I have got no idea how to go about implementing this..

ha ha nice one. With lots of free time and nothing much to do I thought I might as well build something that people can use until ghost comes around.

If people keep making them, clearly existing solutions aren't quite getting it right, otherwise no one would bother.

> and a .io domain

And that's just Github's domain... Furthermore, Google is currently treating .io as a generic TLD. Considering the exhaustion of .com and .net addresses, is it any surprise that people have adopted another one en masse?