[HN Gopher] Netlify Drop
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Netlify Drop
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-11-17 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (app.netlify.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (app.netlify.com)
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| > HTTPS is automatic
|
| > Have you seen the little green locks on your browser? That
| means the site is safe and secure using HTTPS.
|
| It's gray.
|
| Not to be nitpicky - maybe it's just my OS theme (KDE Breeze
| Dark), but the HTTPS padlock is gray or dark-white in all three
| browsers I tested: Edge, Chrome, Firefox. Can anyone confirm?
| matt_heimer wrote:
| 2018 - https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-
| security-...
| Chilko wrote:
| Gray for me on Chrome, Windows 10
| knodi123 wrote:
| The perils of describing the UI of a fast-developing app.
|
| Now tell me what icon is on your browser's Home button! :-)
| yodon wrote:
| This seems so clearly the right capability to offer with the
| right features incl. https and custom domains. Are there a dozen
| other versions of this already?
| solarkraft wrote:
| There's also https://render.com/, which hosts your static site
| from a GitHub repo (can be private) for free.
|
| That's about the only popular alternative I had found about a
| year ago.
| christophilus wrote:
| Render is great. I'm using it for my current project. No
| complaints. Simple, and effective.
| user3113 wrote:
| There is also https://www.stormkit.io/
| tbeseda wrote:
| and https://surge.sh/ should always get a mention when
| static site hosting comes up
| JonM wrote:
| This certainly wins on convenience and accessibility for non-
| developers.
|
| I was working on a similar concept, but it still required some
| dev skills (use curl or github actions) -
| https://www.gostaticapp.com/
| v1g1l4nt3 wrote:
| Big fan of Netlify and also their director of developer
| experience, Cassidy Williams. She's able to distill "life as a
| developer" accurately into memes. 'Tis a gift. Her twitter with
| best memes: https://twitter.com/cassidoo Recent interview:
| https://srcgr.ph/cassidy-williams
| js4ever wrote:
| How is this not abused to hell?
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| Static content, no server side. Plus it's temporary unless you
| sign up for an account.
| jawns wrote:
| You can still post horribly illegal content and make
| nefarious calls to other services from a static site.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| They do, but nobody cares. I'm sure if you report them
| they'll do something if it violates their TOS.
|
| In practice, I've seen these being used for black hat SEO
| and copyright infringement.
| technobabbler wrote:
| The pages are temporary.
|
| And not really that different from the other free hosts out
| there (Github Pages, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Gatsby, Google
| App Engine). It's just easier to use.
| rchaud wrote:
| It will be. I remember Dropbox having this exact same feature
| in 2015. A dev once sent me a basic HTML prototype as a public
| Dropbox folder w/ CSS and JS and HTML files. It worked great.
|
| Then one day, Dropbox shut down that feature. Pretty sure there
| wasn't any announcement.
| maxpert wrote:
| Reminds me of of good old PHP shared hosting days. It was so much
| fun to just write my code and then just drop the folder over
| Filezilla and everything just works!
|
| Bug no problem! Live editing!
| mrtksn wrote:
| As everything has become so complex people decided that the
| solution is to build containers that are even more complicated
| but you can move them around.
|
| It starts to feel like there's an appetite to try another way
| where you actually move around the stuff you created and not
| entire containers of your setup.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I have fond memories of the FTP side bar in Macromedia
| Dreamweaver. Press the push button and website gets instantly
| updated.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Last company I worked for pushed me on multiple occasions to
| install an FTP extension for VSCode that would upload files
| on save. Glad I got out, everything was a nightmare there.
| pier25 wrote:
| I know people that still work like this lol. Fixing stuff right
| in production.
| papito wrote:
| That's actually normal now. We've come full circle, but it's
| called "observability" - since you can't integration test the
| 100 microservices that you have (for no reason), just throw
| it into prod and see of anything turns red.
| lethologica wrote:
| It's not that I want to, it's that I'm forced to.
| Softcadbury wrote:
| Oups, my connection string is visible by everyone
| joemi wrote:
| It's obviously not really suitable for businesses anymore, but
| if you don't have a personal site that you can do this on, I
| feel bad for you.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| This reminds me of how deployment used to be for simple things on
| the web. You'd develop locally then ftp it onto your servers.
| jayd16 wrote:
| under construction gifs abounded but the rough edges made
| things a bit more approachable.
| handrous wrote:
| Not only that--it used to perform really well.
|
| For years, a repeated (if, sadly, uncommon) experience for me
| has been:
|
| "Holy shit, this web site/app is fast!"
|
| _Looks at URL bar, sees a '.php' at the end_
| knodi123 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember I used to work at a perl webshop, and I was
| experimenting with PHP.... I actually lost a half hour or so
| trying to figure out how to get my site to refresh and
| rerender, and it turned out it was! But it was so much faster
| than Perl that I assumed nothing was happening. Hey, I was
| young, don't be too hard on me!
| handrous wrote:
| There's a web framework performance comparison project out
| there that makes HN from time to time, and IIRC the
| findings have been you basically can't reliably beat PHP
| performance _at serving dynamic web sites_ without
| resorting to a compiled language--and even then, it 's far
| from guaranteed.
|
| I haven't written much PHP in a long time, but I'd believe
| it. There are some really slow _programs_ in PHP
| (Wordpress...) but the language is damn fast. Its tendency
| to be only a thin wrapper over C or C++, such that one
| rarely spends much time in PHP itself, is probably the main
| reason.
| johnebgd wrote:
| I remember those days. Before framework were popular for PHP
| sites and SQL injection was not just possible but expected
| for anything that ended in .PHP or .php3 ...
| marban wrote:
| SFTP live editing ftw!
| omgitsabird wrote:
| I understand what you are saying, but simple things still
| exist, and it is the same way as it used to be.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| IIRC, this is exactly how prolific indie startup founder
| levelsio does it to this day.
| Apofis wrote:
| He's proof that techies overthink things... he's doing $1M+
| yearly with nomadlist.
| preetamjinka wrote:
| Described here https://levels.io/deviance/ (Dec 10, 2020)
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| > I write my code in Sublime Text, then I test it on my
| laptop (I have NGINX locally, so I open nomadlist.test
| for ex), then if it works I upload it with Panic Transmit
| via SFTP.
|
| My naive question is: what happens if one user (or more)
| is making a payment at the very exact moment the code
| uploading is happening? My naive answer is: I don't know,
| it could crash (e.g., half the code base has been
| uploaded to the server but the other half is still being
| transmitted... but code in the first half references code
| in the second) or not.
|
| Am I missing something? I imagine failures like this one
| are of no importance to the author (which is totally
| fine, trade offs I know).
| supermatt wrote:
| It's a single file app ;)
| mejutoco wrote:
| Probably the third-party payment integration is available
| (that is not a single php uploaded manually :)). So
| either the api call goes through and it gets completed or
| it does not go through and no charges. As long as the
| whole payment is on a third-party (like Stripe) I do not
| think there would be an undefined state.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| agreed. I make the same point about LEGO. whenever yet
| another person complains about all the big/special pieces
| that have become more common in recent years. Its like... do
| they realize we still have all the same basic rectangular
| bricks, plates and tiles we ever had? except in many more
| colors and variants and ponies and rainbows and BBQ etc etc
| etc.
|
| The old web is still _there_ for us, if we let it, just as
| the old LEGO is still. we simply have to choose them, and
| promote them, and build with them.
|
| Its fully up to us.
| [deleted]
| yosito wrote:
| Can anyone recommend the most effortless static site generators
| to go along with this?
|
| I'd love something that I can just pick a template, write a
| command, and have a basic starter site for my idea up and running
| in less than 15 minutes.
|
| My ideal workflow would be something like:
|
| 1) Buy a domain
|
| 2) npx create-fast-site --template basic-landing-page
|
| 3) echo "Hello, world!" > home.md
|
| 4) npm run build
|
| 5) Drag and drop build directory to Netlify
|
| 6) Add my domain to Netlify
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I'm trying it out now, but I am finding that Svelte Kit does
| this.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| For my blog I'm using Next.js with https://mdxjs.com/ and if
| you know react it's great
| yosito wrote:
| Oh, mdx looks really cool. Could be cool to build a data viz
| blog with that and OWID's grapher.
| kuon wrote:
| I use zola now. With esbuild if I need to compile/bundle js.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I second Zola. I use it with tailwind too.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| Been playing around with Zola. Need to get tailwindcss
| hooked up.
|
| I ran into an issue when building with netlify.
|
| https://tylerharpool.com/netlify/
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I was completely confused with tailwind/headlessui when I
| tried out the Next.JS starter kit a few months ago. Then I
| slowly replaced my custom CSS with tailwindcss, and in
| about an hour only tailwind was left.
|
| Something delectable about starting off "wtf is this stupid
| shit?" and ending with "it all makes perfect sense". Also
| heroicons.
| mr-karan wrote:
| +1 for Zola
|
| I wrote a post on my reasons for moving away from Hugo
|
| https://mrkaran.dev/posts/migrating-to-zola/
| triptych wrote:
| A new player here is Astro --> https://astro.build/ It is
| surprisingly simple. Made by the folks who created snowpack.
| bravefoot wrote:
| I've used eleventy (https://www.11ty.dev/) with Netlify and it
| was very simple. Eleventy is the most featureful static site
| generator out there, but its probably the easiest to use.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Can't recommend it (I haven't used it yet), but astro has been
| coming up a lot lately in my circles. Seems great, especially
| if you are putting up a frontend blog. You can ship static
| assets wherever possible and javascript / react / svelte / etc.
| when you want to.
| 40four wrote:
| For what it's worth, my favorite is Eleventy
| https://www.11ty.dev/ It has a plethora of templating options,
| and I find the dev experience to be very nice. It is very
| flexible, and does not force you to follow any rigid pattern,
| like many others do.
| andyford wrote:
| Bet on Eleventy... the creator of it works for Netlify
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| Review the list and pick something written in a language you're
| most comfortable with, which has a decent amount of stars
| indicating the dev/theme ecosystem.
|
| https://jamstack.org/generators/
| srik wrote:
| Jekyll still fits the bill. It is simple, does data with
| collections, supports templates(which accept parameters and can
| thus be "component-ized"). It's also supported natively by
| GitHub which is a big plus, because you can hook up your repo
| to a custom domain for free too.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I've found Hugo to be a good option.
|
| https://gohugo.io/
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Hugo is absolutely fantastic and incredibly powerful. It's
| nowhere near as simple as was requested. It's the most setup
| of any of the SSGs worth using.
| knuthsat wrote:
| I don't find it powerful at all. Very hard to map through
| structures in templates.
|
| Much easier to write templates in a real language.
|
| Most of the time I need to map data to something else
| suitable for rendering. That mapping goes from markdown
| frontmatter to some nice form.
|
| I ended up not using templates at all due to how cumbersome
| it is to write any kind of data transformations inside the
| template language.
|
| Might as well just generate html myself.
|
| A nice example is generating menu contents from a list of
| menu items with their sort weight and links. Ends up being
| very cumbersome.
| qudat wrote:
| Agreed. I have been using hugo for my blog https://erock.io
| and I still don't completely understand how it works. I
| just have enough to pattern match on to figure things out
| skrtskrt wrote:
| The biggest issue with Hugo for me was trying to create a
| custom theme (in order to get a stripped-down site without
| a bunch of BS), everything breaks if you don't arrange all
| the files exactly the way required by Hugo themes.
|
| Once I got that, and learned some Go templating in the
| process, it's just markdown files, fire and forget.
| cpach wrote:
| It does indeed have a bit of a learning curve. IMHO it's
| worth the investment, YMMV.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| 1) Fork a svelte-kit or next project on GitHub
|
| 2) Open Vercel (or Netlify)
|
| 3) Select the repo you forked
|
| 4) Add domain
|
| You're live
|
| If you want something blog-like:
| https://github.com/rodneylab/sveltekit-blog-mdx
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Can confirm. Took me about 20 minutes last week to purchase a
| new domain, change name servers to Cloudflare, create a
| Vercel account, setup a project, add a custom domain, and
| then update A/cname records. I'd never used Vercel before
| then.
| marcus_cemes wrote:
| I've heard good things about https://gohugo.io/ (written in Go)
| and https://elderguide.com/tech/elderjs/ (uses Svelte), I've
| never used them though
| crate_barre wrote:
| I'll do you one better. Make an HN account, submit your blog
| posts as a text submission. Get a domain and redirect it to:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=yosito
|
| Or even better better, get a domain, make an index.html with
| two tags in the body, like so:
|
| <H1>My blog posts</H1>
|
| <iframe src="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=yosito"
| />
|
| Then just make your posts on HN.
| reidjs wrote:
| This is a clever hack, serverless!
| [deleted]
| revskill wrote:
| Except for PHP files ?
| tyingq wrote:
| Drag/drop of php into a free service sounds like it likely
| wouldn't last long. You would have to spend a lot of time
| figuring out how to deal with resource use and security from
| your new customers.
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| Netlify only serves static content (usually after a build
| process).
| jypepin wrote:
| That would be great if they could provide FTP info so we could
| finally go full circle and get back to uploading our websites
| with an FTP Client!
| rchaud wrote:
| Who is still making multi-page websites the old fashioned way?
| This won't even support PHP, so you have to update your menus
| manually across each page if you add/remove a menu item. I
| understand SSGs can create templates, but isn't everybody using
| Github pages to publish? Is a drag and drop solution the way to
| go to pull those users away?
|
| I have a Digital Ocean droplet with PHP installed, so I can drag
| and drop a simple folder-based website and only update the PHP
| include files if there's a change that needs to be displayed
| sitewide.
|
| SSGs seem overly complicated to me considering that most web
| hosts already come with PHP installed, and the main benefit of
| such sites (dynamic menus) can be handled by a couple of lines of
| code.
| defaultname wrote:
| The normal way to publish is to point them (Netlify and
| alternatives) at a git repo and they pull, follow configured
| build rules, generating the resulting static site (then
| updating it whenever the repo sees new commits). This drop
| mechanism is likely just to draw people into the ecosystem by
| making it easily demonstrated, but clearly isn't a long term
| solution.
| Dedime wrote:
| TBH I find it completely wild that someone prefers PHP to a
| statically generated site (Assuming you can get away with
| statically-generated). Just serving static files is way way way
| faster than running a backend, not to mention all of the
| process efficiencies you get by not having to manage servers
| etc.
|
| When I update my blog (statically-generated), I add an .md file
| containing the blog post, commit it to git, and push it to a
| git repo. A quick CI/CD build fires off which generates the
| HTML (~1 bash command in a docker container) and pushes the
| static files to a file server. Easy!
| rchaud wrote:
| I guess it depends on how a person started off with web dev.
| I have always made personal web pages directly inside an
| .html or .php site. Instead of "##", I used <h2></h2> and so
| on. I don't code for a living so my practices will seem
| pretty archaic because there's no git, no Webpack or script
| minification/Gzip involved.
|
| I remember starting an Android course ~9 years ago and then
| giving up within the first hour because I could not configure
| the Eclipse environment properly. I think the same would have
| been true of web dev if I had to set up a Docker container
| just to get to "Hello World".
|
| HTML has that "just works" quality that kept me interested in
| learning.
| bachmeier wrote:
| If you want to work with html files, you can always add a
| CDN link to something like Marked: https://marked.js.org/
| You can enter the text of your post in markdown but it will
| be rendered as html.
| detaro wrote:
| Running PHP doesn't necessarily mean "managing servers",
| that's what hosting providers are for. And static sites have
| their own limitations, so it's not that surprising that
| people prefer the flexibility.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Having php available opens many doors if you wanted to add
| something non-static even something small.
|
| Not running a backend can be limiting and force external
| services for simple tasks.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I have picoCMS (php).
|
| I just open my FTP, drop a markdown file, and that's it. No
| repos, no CI/CD, no nothing.
| mfollert wrote:
| https://jamstack.wtf
| KMnO4 wrote:
| And here I was thinking PHP is definitely "the old fashioned
| way".
|
| There are _tons_ of static site generators[0], and it's fairly
| trivial to have a complex web app not require a hosted server
| since you can use local storage, web workers, Firebase, etc.
|
| [0]: https://jamstack.org/generators/
| vagrantJin wrote:
| Iirc, Netlify was for _jamstack_...if I recall from their early
| marketing stuff on my emails.
| outloudvi wrote:
| I thought Netlify has already made a drap-and-deploy feature at
| the bottom of https://app.netlify.com/teams/{username}/sites ,
| any difference for this?
| swyx wrote:
| this was the OG iteration of Netlify called BitBalloon - visit
| a page and drip a folder in and have it be hosted. critically,
| you can do this without signing up first - which is nice for
| user acquisition
| sneak wrote:
| It's also nice for pirates and pornographers. :D
| funnyflamigo wrote:
| Don't forget data-exfiltration, malware hosting, and C&C!
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's exactly where my mind went too. So easy for this to
| be exploited.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| ThanosJS ;)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2018)
|
| Anything new since then you think?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Reminder: you don't have to upvote it to enjoy it. Upvoting
| isn't 'mark as seen'.
|
| Not new people!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| https://www.netlify.com/blog/2018/08/14/announcing-netlify-d...
| ndom91 wrote:
| Yeah I remember this as BitBalloon as well, its how I ended up
| with a super low Netlify user Id as well :)
| crate_barre wrote:
| In the metaverse, you will carry your site and place it in a box
| called the "internet".
|
| I'm Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm a visionary.
| fezzez wrote:
| If I remember correctly, I this was the original product Netlify
| started with.
|
| Not new, but just been here the whole time.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I've been looking for exactly this for a long time! I have also
| hosted a static (11ty) site on Netlify for a long time!
|
| ...and so I can't help thinking there's some dots not being
| connected somewhere, either in my brain (likely) or in
| Netlify's communication of their products and offerings
| (possibly?)
| jonsully wrote:
| Yep! Netlify's schtick has been easy deployments (including
| drag and drop) since the start!
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Netlify raises $105M and acquires OneGraph_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253069 - Nov 2021 (100
| comments)
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(page generated 2021-11-17 23:00 UTC)