Show HN: Sparktype – a CMS and SSG that runs entirely in the browser

48 pointsposted 3 months ago
by mattkevan

12 Comments

lenova

3 months ago

I love this idea. There are so many use-cases where friends or clients need a simple interface for building a quick wiki-style documentation site. I've often suggested static site generators desktop apps like Publii to them before, but even that can be a bit on the heavy-side in terms of their requirements.

First feature request: auto light/dark theme adjustment.

First bug report: when I tried adding authentication to a test site, I received this error:

  Failed to enable protection: Failed to execute 'atob' on 'Window': The string to be decoded is not correctly encoded.
Keep up the good work!

mattkevan

3 months ago

Thanks for the bug report! Will take a look at that.

jeff-hykin

3 months ago

One of my long term goals is generating tauri builds on the web. E.g. click "build" and wasm cross compiles a .exe, a .app, and a .appimage which start downloading. Theres a long way to go before that's possible, but theres been pretty steady progress. Especially now that clang was compiled to wasm theres a real avenue to bootstrap everything.

dmje

3 months ago

This could be cool but it’s hard to tell - mobile just doesn’t seem to work and I’m going to guess that’s most people’s first touchpoint with it?

Will try on laptop later…

mattkevan

3 months ago

Thanks, will take a look at why it’s not working. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t!

ngc6677

3 months ago

Excellent idea!

Really cool that it respects the SSG conventions and separation of content, collections, templates, themes etc.

fleahunter

3 months ago

[flagged]

mattkevan

3 months ago

Thanks for your comments, I appreciate it!

Yes a core part of what I’ve tried to do is separate content from presentation. This all started by trying to build an alt-protocol like Gemini or Gopher as a minimal writing and publishing experience. I realised that for it to be useful it needed to be accessible by browsers, so I added the SSG layer. But it still publishes the source content and config alongside the HTML. This means sites can be accessed by more than just browsers - as an experiment I made a CLI client that parses the source directly.

Themes can be imported via a URL or as a zip file and are pretty similar to Jekyll or 11ty themes. My next task is to port a bunch of them over. I’m also planning to create ready-configured template sites that users can copy and configure. Maybe take an Astro or Ghost approach, with a mix of free and paid themes.

lenova

3 months ago

> This all started by trying to build an alt-protocol like Gemini or Gopher as a minimal writing and publishing experience.

I took the briefest of looks at the Gopher/Gemini/alt-publishing scene and found it interesting (though I went no further than surface level research). I'd be interested in hearing more about where this experimentation took you!

opengrass

3 months ago

I like it. How are netlify and Github credentials stored across re-visit? Also no ftp in publishing.

mattkevan

3 months ago

Hey thanks! Secrets are stored in the browser cache but not exported, so they’ll persist until the cache is cleared. If you open the site in a new browser you’ll need to re-enter the credentials.

I found I wasn’t able to add FTP support without some sort of proxy service. However I am working on wrapping it into a native Tauri app. This will have more publishing options as it’s not so constrained by what you can do in a browser.

opengrass

3 months ago

env import would be useful or some auth server that gets it.