🪦 Haunty

Easiest way:

1. Download your site (from the top bar)
2. Unzip it (there should be a public folder inside it)
3. Open Netflify
4. Drag your public folder where it says to

Otherwise, there are a few other places you can host a static site, like Neocities, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Firebase, AWS Amplify, and Gitlab Pages.

You'll typically want to upload just the public folder to them.

Some of those services require that you set up a GitHub account and repo for your site, so if that sounds daunting, I'd stick with Netlify or Neocities.

Note: This site isn't affiliated with Netlify or any of those other hosts

Haunty is a static site generator or content management system or blogging platform, depending on how you want to look at it.

You can write posts or pages and Haunty will connect them all and apply an HTML theme to them.

It outputs a zip file you can use to make further edits or take the public folder to host as a website. See How do I get my site on the internet? (hosting) for more on that.

Haunty is all browser-based, meaning there's no server compiling your site. All data and processing stays in your web browser.

It's kind of like the old days of websites, where you'd just write HTML pages and upload them somewhere.

Static sites don't rely on an online content management system (CMS, like Squarespace or Tumblr or Medium) to write posts and serve your website. That said, it's a bit confusing because static sites still need a host and usually some sort of CMS to generate usable HTML.

If you just write a page of HTML, that's a static site. But you'll usually want fancy text formatting, multiple pages, each one with some styling, as well as navigational elements (like pagination) to link them all together. A static site generator is designed to handle all that for you.

Haunty is for a couple different types of people:

1. People who want to make a simple, decent-looking website/blog but don't want to use a service like Wordpress/Squarespace/Substack/Medium/Tumblr or figure out the complicated processes of doing everything manually.
2. People who don't have the time or patience to deal with installing/configuring/using overly-complicated static site generators.

Haunty requires users to be reasonably technical to handle writing posts with markdown and be able to get files hosted.

If you are unfamiliar with those concepts, see these other parts of the FAQ:

• Why are there asterisks and hashes and other weird symbols in the post editor?
• How do I get my site on the internet? (hosting)

Doesn't everyone make a static site generator eventually?

I see articles every couple months lamenting the loss of the old web, or telling people to write more, or to make blogs. But when it comes to actually creating a blog or site, people are limited to a few less-than-ideal options:

1. Use a free service with limited control over your site/branding, constant attempts to extract money from you and your readers (ads, subscription pop-ups), and social networky stuff baked in (e.g. Medium, Tumblr, Substack)
2. Pay a sizable recurring amount for a simple website (e.g. Ghost & Wordpress's PaaS or Squarespace)
3. Pay for a VPS, install and configure the OS, install Ghost/Wordpress, and hope your site doesn't get hacked because you forgot to install updates or you misconfigured something
4. Pay for a slow webhost and install Ghost/Wordpress and try to customize them (assuming you're not too technical if you've chosen this option)
5. Follow complicated and convoluted processes of installing, configuring, and using a static site generator and figuring out how to host it (e.g. Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll, 11ty)

The static site generator option is the worst for most people. Most creative folk aren't going to be using the command line, installing dependencies, editing template partials, or setting up build pipelines.

I thought I could make static site generators a lot simpler to get started with and use.

There's still quite a bit of friction in my implementation, like the markdown editor, figuring out hosting, editing templates, and dealing with the exported files. I'm hoping to improve on some of these in the future. I doubt I'll ever want to host user sites myself, so if you'd like to integrate a simple hosting solution, send me a message.

That's markdown. It's a kind of basic programming language for styling text. You should be able to use the buttons along the top of the post editor to do it all for you.

If you want to learn more about markdown, there's a guide here.

Read the Theme guide

Since there are a bunch of things you can mess up, the broadest solution to get things back to defaults is:

1. Export your site and unzip it
2. Download the site template
3. Replace any files that got goofed up in your site with the template files (or vice versa)
4. Reimport your site folder in settings

Alternately, you can delete your site from settings and start over. If you want to retain any posts or templates, be sure to download a local copy of your site before deleting.

All the logic is in the browser. None of your content gets uploaded anywhere (unless one of the 3rd party modules I'm using is doing something it's not supposed to).

The site preview renders locally to an iframe using a bunch of goofy tricks. It replaces links with rerender calls, replaces img srcs with data URLs, and inlines external CSS/JS.

The code is currently just in the page source and linked js files. I might put it on github eventually but I don't want to be an open source maintainer right now in my life. You can make a local copy of the HTML/js files and change them however you want for your own personal needs.

If you run into a bug, you can let me know at igor@haunty.org and I may or may not fix it.

For simplicity's sake, Haunty is only designed to do the bare minimum to get most folks up and running.

I don't, this is just a hobby. I'm not even really a programmer.

That's the cool thing about Haunty being local and browser-based: You don't have to trust me with anything! I never see or handle your posts/files. You can verify that yourself by looking at the page source files.

You should be able to pretty easily transfer your posts to some other system if you ever feel like it.