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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

That concept reminds me if Joel Splosky's CityDesk[1] software which ran locally (desktop rather than web) and had a publish button to upload the results.

I quite liked it but development tailed off after a couple of years so I imagine it failed in the marketplace.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/12/what-does-citydesk...

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I think Publii[0] is the modern equivalent as it also runs on desktop and provides a blog-ish CMS with its own editor. I used it to make a small devlog[1] some time ago (on which i only wrote a single article, proving once and for all that the reason i do not blog more isn't because of the blog tech but because i'm too lazy to and i'd rather be writing endless posts in messageboards :-P). I do prefer the CityDesk style though[2], even if Publii is technically more powerful.

[0] https://getpublii.com/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/devlog/

[2] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/nyan/gimme/cdsite/

I used Publii for my blog, but it was very constraining in terms of its styling (the templates were mediocre). And I had made changes to its defaults for styling (which ended up not being responsive), so that when upgrades came around, it messed things up enough that I just stayed on prior versions. Now I'm stuck.

The whole template problem, along with customization (or is it configuration?) is the biggest blocker for me. I'm going back to a straightforward Markdown-like to HTML generator for my next blog revision.

Yeah, i wanted to make a simpler template like the one used in CityDesk or the one in the root site (that i haven't updated for ages however i already had made a custom template for consistency: the "Blog" part was generated by Pelican and the rest of the site with a custom generator) instead of the heavy one i ended up using (that IMO is the best -or least bad- among those available, at least according to my taste and needs :-P). But when i tried to figure out how to make a custom theme i just noped away.

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