[HN Gopher] The Static Site Paradox
___________________________________________________________________
The Static Site Paradox
Author : alraj
Score : 236 points
Date : 2024-10-08 09:08 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kristoff.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (kristoff.it)
| paulpauper wrote:
| There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a static
| website. Is a website without a MYSQL database still static if it
| has JavaScript or php template include files? A pure static
| website in which each page has to be manually edited would be a
| headache.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| IME, the closest definition is simply a site containing flat
| files only. No server-side scripting, but client-side
| JavaScript very much allowed. That doesn't necessarily mean
| 'manually editing' each page, although some writing probably
| has to be done at some point, unless you're outsourcing that to
| an LLM...
| wakeupcall wrote:
| What about fully client-rendered templates/sites that require
| JS for visualization? (ie, no graceful degradation at all).
|
| Technically static, but absolutely of the worst kind in my
| opinion.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I totally agree -- technically static, but an abomination
| that should be avoided at all costs!
| timw4mail wrote:
| An abominable default, sadly.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Surely a static web site is one that could be downloaded with
| something like wget or curl and would still work by browsing
| the files directly from the file system without needing an
| actual web server?
| Akronymus wrote:
| Thats what I expect a static site to be too. Along with
| preferably as little js as reasonable.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Here's me waffling about this question for about four
| paragraphs, copied below for your reading pleasure :p :)
| (source: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shite-the-static-
| sites-from-... )
|
| > What is a static website?
|
| > Static simply means as-is. Its inverse is "dynamic", meaning
| in-transit. The "static" part of "static website" corresponds
| to stored information. The "website" part corresponds to where
| from and how, the information gets to one's computer. A web-
| site is literally a place (site) on the World Wide Web, whence
| our computer has to fetch the information we want.
|
| > Fetching information, such as a web page, over the Internet
| is "dynamic" by definition. Even just opening a file on your
| own computer's disk is "dynamic". The very act of reading a
| digital file, and/or transmitting it, means copying its bits
| from one place and showing them in another place 3.
|
| > The Ultimate Static Site, is a file that once written never
| changes. Thus, once-received we never have to fetch it again
| (unless we lose it). Reality is of course not so simple. But we
| will work with the "static means never changing" mental model,
| because we can go pretty far with just that.
| WCSTombs wrote:
| IMO, the pages can be compiled statically on a static website,
| so the HTML doesn't need to be manually edited for each page.
| But yeah, I guess there are degrees of staticness. My (brand
| new) personal website is literally all written from scratch
| right now, but soon it will probably be pregenerated from
| Markdown sources. I would still call that static, but to a
| lesser degree.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a
| static website
|
| Static website can be served by `cat index.html`
| enriquto wrote:
| > Static website can be served by `cat index.html`
|
| For sure, but that's not a sufficient definition. You need to
| add some constraints to the contents of the html. Otherwise,
| you can put a huge javascript program in there that
| hallucinates a new page each time you render it. This
| shouldn't count as "static".
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > This shouldn't count as "static".
|
| Why not? If it doesn't, where do you draw the line, apart
| from "absolutely no javascript at all"?
| enriquto wrote:
| That's a good line to draw!
|
| Static = no scripting (either server-side or client-side)
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I'd like to reserve the term "no scripting" for that :) I
| guess if we popularise the term "no backend", the two
| could co-exist. I want to talk about sites that are just
| a collection of flat files, with no server-side
| processing; for me, "static" does that job perfectly.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| It generally does count as static though. In this context
| static has a technical meaning, not the dictionary
| definition. It's static from the server side, meaning that
| you don't need any special logic to serve it.
| reliablereason wrote:
| What?
|
| A static website is a website that has no server side
| generation. That's how simple it is.
| gsck wrote:
| I would say a static website is just one that doesn't do any
| extra work on the client to generate the content. Either SSR or
| just plain HTML files
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| The trouble is defining what "the content" means. Are you
| saying "no JS" -- if so, just say so! Otherwise, how are you
| distinguishing between "content" and ... "other stuff"?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Static website serves you everything you need as a one HTML
| file. You can save the source code and open it offline and
| there will be no difference.
|
| As such any templating is out of the question if that is done
| via request from the client.
|
| How I manage my static website is with a build script. I write
| my content in markdown with a option for custom header and then
| I have a python script that churns out pure HTML with
| everything embedded into it which I can then host on github
| pages.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| This, but without the "one HTML file" restriction. Unless I
| misunderstood you--did you just mean "one HTML file per URL"?
| lupusreal wrote:
| This is the first time I've ever heard of somebody being
| confused about this. If the server is serving dynamically
| generated documents, then it isn't static. A static website can
| be perfectly represented as a directory of files being served
| by _python -m http.server_. No PHP templates, that should be
| obvious.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I agree with you; not even SSI.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Good question, with answers ranging from "a bunch of hand-
| edited HTML files" to "a set of HTML files generated from a
| non-HTML syntax such as a markdown derivative or a programming
| language's object-literal syntax", with the latter (static site
| _generators_ ) being quite different from the former.
|
| And then there's also SGML which has everything HTML, as a
| last-mile markup language for delivery to browsers, assumed to
| have available for authors, such as text macros and shared
| fragments for eg. menus, auto-generating document outlines for
| page navigation, processing markdown into HTML, filtering into
| RSS or SERPs, etc., and even moderately complex dynamic site
| features such as integrating external/syndicated content and
| screening/validating user comments for malicious or other
| undesired input such as script, broken comments, external/spam
| links, and the like.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| There definitely is a consensus on what static website means.
| Have you tried doing a basic Web search of the term?
|
| > A pure static website in which each page has to be manually
| edited would be a headache.
|
| There are static site generators for a reason.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > There is still not a censuses as to the definition of a
| static website.
|
| No server side scripting. OK to have client side scripting
| (e.g. JS). Basically, how things ran back in the 90's for most
| people who couldn't afford ASP or a paid web host.
| davedx wrote:
| > normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make
| them pay for every little thing
|
| Huh? You're not confined to Automattic or WP-Engine, there are
| tons and tons of regular web hosting providers with Wordpress and
| a bunch of other stuff included in a standard hosting package,
| you can use the free Wordpress, and you can self-host. That's the
| whole point of Wordpress being open source, and it's working as
| intended.
|
| There's absolutely nothing wrong with the status quo around
| blogging.
|
| Static site generators are used by technologists who want to
| tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest
| devtool benchmark tool is called. Which is fine too, good for you
| if that's what you like to do with your time! For "normies" (or
| SME's who just want to publish their web content and move on),
| there are more than enough options around.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| If you are don't know anything about cars but suddenly would
| need a one, would you go to the nearest car dealer you heard
| about from somewhere or immediately go to the specific
| resources where you can find a specific model and make you need
| at a better price?
| notpushkin wrote:
| You can then move it out of the dealer's parking spot if you
| find a place cheaper.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Static site generators are used by technologists who want to
| tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest
| devtool benchmark tool is called
|
| No? Downloading Hugo, getting a random theme and writing a few
| articles is pretty simple and requires no more tinkering than
| doing the same with a Wordpress (okay, one's actions are big
| buttons in a UI, the other is copy pasting commands, but in
| terms of _effort_ , there's barely any difference).
|
| I use Hugo because it's light and allows me to have a blog
| running for free and scale to infinity (I have at least two
| articles that sat high up on the front page of HN, and there
| was neither a hug of death nor a bill associated), with zero
| maintenance, while also having flexibility if I need it. I
| haven't even checked my score on Google's whatever and I don't
| care about it.
|
| As for WordPress, none of what you described can be had for
| free, and it requires ongoing maintenance (updates to keep up
| with the crappy ecosystem).
| graemep wrote:
| > okay, one's actions are big buttons in a UI, the other is
| copy pasting commands,
|
| The difference is that the console is scary to the average
| user, big buttons are not.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I think you should reexamine the Hugo getting started
| workflow. I think it is pretty scary for a non tech literate
| person. Even as a programmer, I thought the initial bootstrap
| to getting a theme in place is clunky. Should come with an
| out of the box template that lets someone immediately bang
| out content.
|
| I could guide Mom how to connect to a Wordpress host. I could
| not say the same for Hugo.
| nikolamus wrote:
| people who know how to "self-host" can do it for free or very
| cheap.
|
| Otherwise WP Engine is $30 per site.
|
| OP says it's not only lame to exploit the knowledge asymmetry
| in this way but also makes web lame long term because normies
| don't have tools to contribute effectively.
| jraph wrote:
| > Static site generators are used by technologists who want to
| tinker and check all the boxes in whatever Chrome's latest
| devtool benchmark tool is called
|
| It's relatively easy to reach a PageSpeed test result of 100
| with WordPress by disabling one or two features and setting up
| a cache extension. For logged out users, WordPress with
| SuperCache set up is almost like a static website (except for
| the occasional cache eviction) because the HTML is almost
| directly served from the cache.
| verisimi wrote:
| Great article.
|
| > Don't you find it infuriating when lawyers and accountants fail
| to clarify how their respective domains work, making them
| unavoidable intermediaries of systems that in theory you should
| be able to navigate by yourself?
|
| > Whenever we fail to make simple things easy in software
| engineering, and webdev especially, we are failing society in the
| exact same way.
|
| Exactly right.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| > Find an SSG (or handcraft everything yourself)
|
| I think this came a bit too late? Astro solves this well, there
| are other solutions too. From startups building webflow-like SSG
| platforms to frameworks like astro that requires basic markdown
| and html.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Yeah, I've found Astro to be the perfect solution without
| compromise. You can have a 100% static site without JS, and you
| can add in JS only as needed.
|
| It doesn't feel heavyweight like similar/older SSGs doc and it
| lets you write TSX-like syntax for reusable components (which I
| really like).
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Plus it is easy to plug in a CMS if you need to upgrade for a
| team solution involving non technical people
| pjmlp wrote:
| > When I published SuperHTML, I discovered that it was the first
| ever language server for HTML that reported diagnostics to the
| user. I wrote a blog post about it, it got on the frontpage of
| Hacker News and nobody corrected me, so you know it's true.
|
| Probably because this is something most IDEs have been doing for
| years, before Microsoft came up with LSP.
| kristoff_it wrote:
| Of all the most popular editors, I think none of them had a way
| of offering diagnostics for vanilla HTML. The only exception
| that I know of is Webstorm.
|
| Vim, Neovim, Helix, Zed, VSCode all shared the same basic
| implementation that has no diagnostics support.
|
| Helix will have SuperHTML enabled by default starting from the
| next release: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/11609
| pjmlp wrote:
| I wrote IDEs not editors, and I am quite sure that the years
| doing ASP.NET and Java EE/Spring development I had enough
| HTML diagnostics to fix since 2001.
| lqet wrote:
| > If you didn't know any better, you would expect almost all
| normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have
| something like [1], but it's actually the inverse: only few
| professional software engineers can "afford" to have the second
| option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are
| stuck with overcomplicated solutions.
|
| I am confused, the inverse would be that professional engineers
| have [2] and normal users have [1]. But then they write that
| almost no professional engineer can "afford" [2], so everybody
| seems to have [1]..?
| jraph wrote:
| I suppose they meant that only a few people, who are
| professional software engineers, can afford the second option.
| gryfft wrote:
| If you continue reading, the reasoning is given in the next
| sentence:
|
| > Weird as it might be, it's not a great mystery why that is:
| it's easier to spin up a Wordpress blog than it is to figure
| out by yourself all the intermediate steps.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| It is indeed written as you say; I suspect - but cannot confirm
| - that the author meant:
|
| > ... only a few people - professional software engineers - can
| "afford" ...
|
| which would be the inverse.
|
| However, there is a case for reading as it is written even if
| it subverts reading expectations, as many (most?) professional
| software engineers do use COTS systems to publish and only a
| few have their own sites generated from scratch.
| smankoo wrote:
| Yes. That is confusingly phrased. Took me a sec too.
| daoistmonk wrote:
| i read it as: "can't afford the overhead of complexity of
| running such a complicated stack for my personal x"
| sandeep_random wrote:
| Somewhere down the line the ease of publishing changes is the
| differentiating factor which should have been accounted in the
| comparison
| dhotson wrote:
| Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do
| have gone way up over time.
|
| Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator
| trap a few times.
|
| It's annoying to start a side project with a static site
| generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and
| suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app.
|
| Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of
| html files. It's way less complicated and quicker to go from idea
| -> execution without bike-shedding or procrastination on tools.
|
| I'm pretty happy writing html and css manually though--I don't
| recommend it for everyone.
|
| The other cool thing is if I then decide to "abort" to rails.. I
| can copy the folder of html files into the rails public/ folder..
| pretty easy upgrade path.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| For blogging I use Hugo because it is just easier to focus on
| content, not on style. That is why I don't like writing pure
| html files. Changing style can also be a problem, if something
| is hardcoded into html file.
|
| For more advanced tasks I write in django, because it so easy
| for me to add features.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder
| of html files.
|
| Same here. I've considered adding a .md --> .html step for
| content, but just haven't found it necessary -- yet.
|
| > The other cool thing...
|
| I like being able to--easily--view my site via a local sever.
| The best case would be one that I can view via file:// too, but
| I couldn't quite crack the organisation and ended up with a
| 'make local' step that generates a separate copy for file-based
| viewing.
| ciroduran wrote:
| I've been posting to my personal website for 20+ years and it's
| been something like: basic HTML -> Drupal (whew) -> Wordpress
| -> basic HTML (via Jekyll).
|
| The fundamental rule I've set myself against feature-bloating
| in my website is defining what I want it to be: an archive of
| things I've done. As an archive, I want it to be very durable
| in time. Thus, static file that are dead-easy to copy around,
| mirror and make it work in any hosting platform.
|
| It did take me a while to nail having a bilingual site, though
| :) but at least it's a price I paid once.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I run a blog for an organization. We do one post per business
| day on average, with typically around 3 posters. I set it up
| years ago with Django/Wagtail/Puput and it has happily chugged
| along ever since. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to
| manage if people were creating their own new files for every
| post and writing their own HTML...
| oliwarner wrote:
| But you've had to maintain that Python/Django stack, as well
| as a server.. Right?! I've done hundreds of Django release
| upgrades. They're not automatic or time-free.
|
| Most SSGs, especially those geared to blogging accept nicer
| markup systems like Markdown. Keeping track of things, even
| in a multi-user system isn't hard.
|
| Getting non-technical people used to a git workflow is the
| hardest part.
| nephanth wrote:
| Now I'm wondering what kind of features you end up adding to
| your website that need server-side code. Comment systems?
| andybak wrote:
| How about a contact form?
| echoangle wrote:
| Here you go:
|
| <form action="mailto:someone@example.com"
| enctype="text/plain">
| andybak wrote:
| In an ideal world yes. But from past experience many
| users have the association for mailto links
| misconfigured.
|
| It's a terrible user experience.
| echoangle wrote:
| Yes, it depends on the target audience. For a personal
| website which the article was about, it would probably be
| fine for most hacker news users. If someone can't manage
| to send me a mail, they probably wouldn't see my website
| anyways. If you do your grandparents personal website, a
| proper form with a backend is better though.
| Calavar wrote:
| Maybe you just haven't found the right static site generator
| for your needs?
|
| Jekyll is the most well known in Ruby space, but it's tailored
| to a specific niche - authoring a blog with Markdown or another
| lightweight markup language. You can certainly massage it into
| doing other things, but it's not that ergonomic as a general
| purpose static site generator.
|
| If you want something that's easy to copy/paste into rails, a
| rack based static site generator like middleman is great
| because you can start writing with erb/haml and ActiveSupport
| from the very beginning.
|
| If you're looking for the simplicity of handwriting HTML and
| CSS but you want some niceties like includes, partial
| templates, link helpers, nanoc is a good static site generator
| that's progressive. Start with plain HTML/CSS, only add
| additional features as you need them.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site
| generator trap a few times.
|
| > It's annoying to start a side project with a static site
| generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and
| suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP
| app.
|
| Hard to discuss without examples. I started using Pelican over
| a decade ago, and am still happy with it. Every once in a while
| I write code to customize the behavior, but it's once every few
| years. It's simple and _just works_.
|
| There are things I miss from dynamic sites, but I don't see how
| a simple folder of HTML files is in any way superior to
| Pelican...
| echoangle wrote:
| How are you handling commonality between pages with plain html
| pages? As long as you don't use iframes, you have to manually
| sync everything that's shared or almost the same on alle pages
| (header, footer, navigation). That's pretty annoying.
| dizhn wrote:
| Pretty sure parent didn't actually mean plain html files for
| everything but if they did then perhaps they're using server
| side includes.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Amusing how underneath this comment, there are several comments
| saying "ah, you just haven't found the right SSG, this one is
| good". Well-intentioned, but completely missing the point.
| KnowtheRopes wrote:
| Yes, static websites are great! I'm using Jekyll with GitHub -
| it's 100% free. I agree, though, there is a learning curve.
| smankoo wrote:
| I'm using hugo. It's great.
| zahlman wrote:
| I've been doing this too, but as a Python expert who always
| meant to learn Ruby but never really got around to it, I hate
| having to wrap my head around the suite of Ruby development
| tools (Bundler and the Gem system etc.) to do local builds, and
| it's currently taking up a seemingly absurd amount of disk
| space when this is the _only_ reason I have any of it
| installed. Considering switching over to Nikola soon so that I
| can just use Python in the ways I 'm familiar with.
| eviks wrote:
| > Weird as it might be, it's not a great mystery why that is:
| it's easier to spin up a Wordpress blog than it is to figure out
| by yourself all the intermediate steps:
|
| This doesn't explain the difference, why would you have to figure
| it out yourself is some other company could just as well sell all
| those services, just with an SSG?
| rwbt wrote:
| Static sites are great until you need to have a contact form or
| want to add basic comments. Yes, you can deploy javascript that
| uses external services to add such functionality to static sites-
| but with a basic WordPress site, you get everything right out of
| the box.
| oleganza wrote:
| I came here to write this exact comment. The article is wrong
| in assuming that WP is wasteful. It gives huge optionality to
| the users: engineers probably can afford going with a static
| page and then changing the entire architecture of their webpage
| once they need some interactivity, but non-engineers want to go
| with a scalable solution: where they start with a contact info
| and slowly end up with a personal shop or whatnot without
| reinventing the setup at each phase transition.
|
| Speaking of optionality and opportunity costs: many engineers
| are trained to see the unseen opportunity costs in technology
| ("YAGNI" and "tech debt" are often used terms), but often fail
| to see the economic opportunity costs: those that would waste
| time and cognitive effort of human beings, not the machines.
| Example: many engineers like to fantasize about micropayments
| architectures "because efficiency", but people cannot calculate
| those. They are better off with a nice round monthly
| subscription just to minimize number of microdecisions they
| have to go through daily.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| A contact form is a terrible alternative to an email address.
| Many sites have dropped comments altogether. Yes, these things
| might be nice-to-haves, but they shouldn't be the factor that
| determines whether you have a static site or a scripted one.
| rwbt wrote:
| I have to politely disagree. If you ever run a website for
| business/portfolio etc. the number of people more likely to
| contact you using a contact form is far greater than just
| telling them to email you. Contact forms also scale well if
| you need to categorize and channel the queries to different
| people or need more specific info.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Fair enough. I would argue that we're probably talking
| about different use cases. If you're at the stage of
| categorising and channelling queries to different people,
| your site is probably already "heavyweight" enough to
| justify a backend anyway.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Yes, and almost all clients will ask you to put a contact
| form on the site.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Nothing stops you from embedding a contact form on a
| page.
|
| Netlify event has a built in workflow where they will
| record the action so you do not have to setup any
| infrastructure.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > Many sites have dropped comments altogether
|
| And many still have. I think most wordpress.com and blogger
| blogs have comments on
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Strongly agree. Wordpress brags as powering whatever % of the
| internet... but if youve ever taken a look at some of that PHP
| source code... yikes
|
| Mind boggling to me such an overly complex system has such a
| large market share.
|
| I'll take my Gatsby TypeScript React components / <<insert your
| favorite static site generator here>> any day
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Technical purity does not win business. Solutions do. WP has
| delivered a rich ecosystem that lets normal people put content
| on the web. Even if it annoys programmers at its technical
| debt.
| caseyy wrote:
| If they calculated the % in terms of CPU time used, they could
| have made the claim even more impressive.
| intellectronica wrote:
| The reason SSGs are primarily interesting to software developers
| is that the software architecture of the site is primarily
| interesting to software developers. Other people (both authors
| and readers) don't care how the pages are produced, they only
| care that the pages are there.
| kristoff_it wrote:
| > Other people (both authors and readers) don't care how the
| pages are produced, they only care that the pages are there.
|
| Readers, sure. Authors? Absolutely not true. Some authors might
| not be tech savvy enough to know better, but they are immensely
| influenced by the process of getting the content online. That's
| the whole reason why there's a huge industry around publishing
| content on the internet.
| parasti wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstand, but this feels misdirected. As someone
| who's employed by "greedy clowns" (web development agencies I
| guess?), I continuously observe that people pay for what saves
| them time. Our entire profession is built on this premise. If you
| have a person doing interesting things, does it really matter if
| they write their own HTML or pay someone else to write it?
|
| The web is turning increasingly monolithic entirely thanks to the
| modern social network conglomerate. That has nothing to do with
| the choice of technology.
| kristoff_it wrote:
| > As someone who's employed by "greedy clowns" (web development
| agencies I guess?)
|
| Maybe click the link so you don't have to guess (wrong)?
| parasti wrote:
| Am I wrong? I did click the link. I'm just assuming that the
| author of this post is not explicitly referring to two
| particular greedy clowns, but more generally to the WordPress
| ecosystem. Because it's actually very easy for normal people
| to avoid being locked into Automattic and WP Engine in
| particular.
|
| Edit: just made the connection between the domain of this
| post and your username. So really just wondering what you
| meant specifically.
| graycat wrote:
| The Hacker News site is (a) "static" or (b) "complex"?
|
| A case of irony?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hacker News is a social network application, not a blog.
| graycat wrote:
| Wouldn't a blog be generally _simpler_ and, thus, generally
| comparatively a better candidate for a "static" site than "a
| social network application"?
|
| The Hacker News pages are "static" -- correct?
|
| For my startup's Web site, I wrote the code in ASP.NET and
| made the site "static" before I heard about "static": So,
| "static" is okay with me for what I did write. When I finally
| (whew!!) go live, I hope the candidate users will not mind,
| or even notice, that the site is "static" and not _single
| page_. Today, do nearly all users expect a "single page"
| site and not like "static"?
|
| Last time I checked, my pages send for ~44KB per page, and
| I'd guess that that is comparatively small?
|
| If only as a user, a single page site can be amazing, subtle,
| surpising, not really intuitive or obvious, but by now there
| may be millions of such sites with significant differences
| between any two, thus, requiring users, by _try it and find
| out_ , to learn how to use the site. In contrast, a static
| site seems to stand on a history of _computer interaction_ ,
| e.g., with the standard controls -- text boxes, check boxes,
| radio buttons, links -- that go back to some IBM work for the
| airline industry and the 3270 terminals and that by now maybe
| 3 billion people understand immediately, and if so then that
| can be an advantage.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The Hacker News pages are "static" -- correct?
|
| No. They are inherently dynamic. They are generated by
| user-submitted content at real time.
|
| On the article's categorization, it would make HN a complex
| site. But the categorization does not apply here.
| kkfx wrote:
| I agree: I've tempted the all-from-scratch way in pure html for
| my small web corner and well, I give up, it's simply too long to
| craft a modern website on basic html. I've tried an RSS-only
| corner but obviously it's not visible, ending up in Hugo/org-mode
| simply because it's ready made even if needlessly complicated.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Whenever we fail to make simple things easy in software
| engineering
|
| Mandatory Rich Hickey "Simple Made Easy" link =>
| https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?si=IY8mWzR3C-ru5Das
|
| "This keynote was given at Strange Loop 2011, and is perhaps the
| best known and most highly regarded of Rich's many excellent
| talks, ushering in a new way to think about the problems of
| software design and the constant fight against complexity."
| foul wrote:
| > Weird as it might be, it's not a great mystery why that is:
| it's easier to spin up a Wordpress blog than it is to figure out
| by yourself all the intermediate steps
|
| Or you could just use publii, an office suite of your choice, or
| type bad html and css by hand, then pass raw files on very cheap
| hosting providers, enjoying a clunky, and sometimes ugly,
| "website".
|
| The industry for this use-case works on looks and
| discoverability: the dichotomy of the WP big bloated piece of
| crap vs static clown generators stands upon having a pretty
| website which is also functional for Google. Any other
| alternative (like the builders or the directories) works the same
| but they also forfeit property of the site from client. It's just
| because these solutions are pretty for cheap, it's fast fashion.
| marc_io wrote:
| > Or you could just use publii, an office suite of your choice,
| or type bad html and css by hand, then pass raw files on very
| cheap hosting providers, enjoying a clunky, and sometimes ugly,
| "website".
|
| WordPress folks are working to enable static generation using
| WordPress Playground. It will work pretty much like Publii does
| today.
|
| https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-playground/issues/707
| superkuh wrote:
| I would never recommend someone making their first site use a
| static site generator or anything PHP or dynamic like that. Just
| make a simple html document in a wysiwyg editor and upload it to
| the server.
| chambers wrote:
| > Don't you find it infuriating when lawyers and accountants fail
| to clarify how their respective domains work, making them
| unavoidable intermediaries of systems that in theory you should
| be able to navigate by yourself? Whenever we fail to make simple
| things easy in software engineering, and webdev especially, we
| are failing society in the exact same way.
|
| I think the better word for this is "straightforward"; see the
| Mythical Man Month:
|
| > For a given level of function, however, that system is best in
| which one can specify things with the most simplicity and
| straightforwardness. Simplicity is not enough. Mooers's TRAC
| language and Algol 68 achieve simplicity as measured by the
| number of distinct elementary concepts. They are not, however,
| straightforward. The expression of the things one wants to do
| often requires involuted and unexpected combinations of the basic
| facilities. It is not enough to learn the elements and rules of
| combination; one must also learn the idiomatic usage, a whole
| lore of how the elements are combined in practice.
|
| > Simplicity and straightforwardness proceed from conceptual
| integrity. Every part must reflect the same philosophies and the
| same balancing of desiderata. Every part must even use the same
| techniques in syntax and analogous notions in semantics. Ease of
| use, then, dictates unity of design, conceptual integrity.
| graypegg wrote:
| In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local
| businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a
| small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had
| built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were
| just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still
| support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web
| hosting provider. It worked great for them. They could always
| keep their online menu updated because... it was exported from
| the word doc they create the print menu from. At the time we sort
| of made fun of them internally... which I feel bad thinking about
| now. It's actually a genius idea when you have a million other
| more important things to do at a restaurant.
|
| It's still easier to make a static site. I think the authoring
| tools to generate HTML just currently suck, or if they don't suck
| they have some process that needs to run on the server to serve
| the site.
| JellyBeanThief wrote:
| I mean, isn't the whole idea of a web _browser_ kind of
| contrary to the ideals of the web? It implicitly divides people
| into speakers and listeners.
|
| In a parallel universe, web browsers are called webitors, and
| they can edit websites as well as view them. People can suggest
| changes. People can publish annotations. Web hosting is like
| email--pick (or build) any service you like and pick (or build)
| any client you like. The protocols will sort it out.
| graypegg wrote:
| Under the hood, the bones of that system are there! `PATCH`
| is a HTTP verb for a reason.
|
| Though making the web this big publicly editable pile of
| documents would create a lot of spam. You already have to
| filter a lot if you have a form on a website, imagine if
| instead of filtering structured data, you had to filter
| diffs.
|
| I think maybe a good half measure is just bringing web
| authoring tools BACK to web browsers! Netscape Navigator had
| one if I remember correctly. This would just allow you to
| write HTML files to disk though.
|
| Bonus point for some standard protocol where you login with
| HTTP Basic Auth, and POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE HTML directly to a
| page. You'd need some special server that understands that,
| but ideally it would be open for anyone to implement. You
| point your browser to https://yoursite.com/my/page.html and
| assuming you've logged in with HTTP Basic Auth, your browser
| suggests creating the page, rather than rendering the
| responded error page.
|
| Edit: Protocol is the wrong word, someone correct me what
| this is really called. HTTP based... editing? A standard API?
| It's now something I want to make so I'll need to figure that
| out haha.
|
| Edit 2: CamperBob2 in a sibling comment mentioned wikis. Just
| realized I'm describing a wiki lol
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's sort of the idea behind a Wiki, isn't it?
|
| There _was_ an effort many years ago to provide browser
| extensions that allowed users to mark up, edit, and annotate
| existing web pages in a way that would be visible to the
| community of users. It never went anywhere, unfortunately,
| probably because it would have gored _way_ too many sacred
| oxen. (And /or it would have been co-opted by spammers,
| turning it into a social networking/reputation management
| project.)
| Kye wrote:
| The term you're looking for exists: user agent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent
|
| What you describe came and went, subsumed under the
| homogenizing effect of silos like Facebook. Mashups were the
| big new thing. There have been various attempts to bring it
| back, but the inertia of silos makes it hard to find anyone
| interested.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, that was a good idea 30 years ago, now the web will
| fill to the brim with spam and AI-generated drivel, all in
| approximately 14 minutes.
|
| Nowadays it's more important than ever to curate content
| well.
| psd1 wrote:
| I don't think that's true - Figma runs in the browser, so
| does HN.
|
| The job of the browser is to _render_. That's agnostic on
| whether you're creating content or just reading it.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I love when businesses do stuff like this. If it works, it
| works.
|
| My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but
| make their solution better and ensure my solution for them
| works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the
| success they already had with what they were doing already.
|
| A lot of developers don't want to admit this--in my experience
| at least--but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions actually work
| better than a ton of strategies experienced web developers
| would implement on their own.
|
| So much of what counts is what the business offers and how they
| relate and interact with customers. Sometimes all that takes is
| a word doc exported to HTML. We can use our skills to improve
| it, but the real magic is in the humans running the business. I
| love it.
|
| I find something fun is that finding ways to improve these
| solutions can actually be genuinely challenging. Sure, you can
| make a better website, you can deploy it with sophisticated
| infrastructure, etc. but at the end of the day, do their
| customers prefer it? Does it improve their business? Sometimes
| that part isn't trivial at all.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Bingo. This is why google sheets is the best cms. Just have a
| data pipeline that rips the data out and upload it the
| webserver
| graypegg wrote:
| Totally! The magic of using your print menu word doc as the
| website is its so little work to keep the site updated. No
| one really cares that a family restaurant in a Toronto suburb
| has a visually stunning website. You just want to see the
| menu, hours, address and phone number. It's always going to
| be updated, exactly the same content as the print menu that
| you actually pay from, and they already knew how to make
| things look legible in word.
|
| It's actually even more charming than any solution we ended
| up providing because this particular restaurant (sadly closed
| now) was run by a 60-70ish year old man, who's cropped
| portrait photo was their logo, `float:left` in the header of
| their index.html exported from Word. I don't think you can
| buy authenticity like that.
|
| I of course thought that was hilarious because I was 19, an
| idiot, with my first tech job thinking I'm such a
| professional cranking out CodeIgniter-based contact forms and
| static About Us pages.
|
| Looking back, I'm pretty sure we did them dirty. Whatever
| solution we sold them on (IIRC, they got a wordpress site
| with a custom theme) was probably less useful. Which sucks.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I've been volunteering with a local political party to help
| them with their technology decisions, primarily on the web,
| and... based on this and prior experiences, I've come to
| the conclusion that agencies do their clients dirty quite
| often. In some cases it looks borderline intentional, in
| others I think it's a disconnect between client needs,
| agency capabilities, communication, and what's ultimately
| delivered.
|
| It seems weird to say it since so many people rely on it,
| but wordpress is overkill for so many things. It frustrates
| so many clients to no end, requires ongoing maintenance
| that's quite expensive in some cases, and well, it requires
| an active server handling server-rendering and form
| submissions and such. The vast majority of clients simply
| don't need it. They don't even need themes.
|
| This party I'm helping has something like 7 wordpress sites
| strewn about, all on hosts that cost way too much, some not
| even updated or maintained at all, sitting on servers that
| peak at like 40% utilization and otherwise hum along at
| near-zero utilization beyond what the wordpress isntance
| requires.
|
| This is a lot of the internet. My experience with these
| folks has inspired me to build something that would meet
| their needs, but it's one of these things where... I don't
| know, if I build it, I doubt anyone would come. But yeah.
| Most people's needs for the internet are remarkably simple.
| Even Wix or similar are way, way too much. Yet those basic
| blogging engines totally miss the mark too. Most of these
| business users aren't interesting in blogging. They just
| want a simple home base where they can dump various types
| of information and let it hang out forever.
|
| I can think of a few products which aim to fix this, but
| they aren't quite simple enough for the types of people
| we're describing. The people who know they need stuff
| online, but don't want to know much about it and don't want
| to learn much either.
| treflop wrote:
| People forget to keep track of how long it takes them to do
| things.
|
| I see people bifurcated into "people good at time estimates"
| and "people who think time estimates are always wrong." The
| former have been keeping track, improved continuously, and
| have become good. The latter have no clue.
|
| Setting up a website from scratch is not hard, but it is time
| consuming, especially when you throw in maintenance.
| Stoids wrote:
| I do consulting for a few restaurants, and despite my
| experience building full-stack web applications, I find
| myself reaching for Excel for most of my deliverables. These
| are "applications" that "non-technical" restaurant operators
| need to be comfortable in. Having a sheet where they paste in
| some data and get their needed output has required the least
| amount of continued maintenance and training. They can drag
| the file around in Dropbox / Google Drive and that works for
| them.
|
| I still try to "engineer" to the best of my ability--
| separating raw input from derived data from configuration,
| data normalization, etc. With Lambda functions in Excel now,
| I kinda just pretend I'm writing Lisp in an FRP editor /
| runtime environment. The ETL tools with PowerQuery are quite
| good for the scale that these restaurants operate at.
|
| Hard for me to turn off my brain in my full-time job when I
| am tasked with poorly recreating a feature that Excel nailed
| years ago.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I have been cursing for a long time over the death of
| Frontpage. Yeah we made fun of it because the HTML it created
| was/is awful. But what it also was was a program that normal
| businesses/people could use to update a small and cheap website
| without having to worry about security beyond picking a good
| password.
|
| I have been looking for a good alternative that can create more
| correct HTML and which gives you more options than Words HTML
| exporter for a couple years now.
| Kye wrote:
| Related: Blogging vs. Blog Setups
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25240939
|
| https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/
| brianzelip wrote:
| > the web doesn't belong just to software engineers. The more we
| make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the
| enclosures that we like to call social networks.
|
| Big up this author. Here's a recent podcast about the recent
| conference this quote came from (Squiggle Conf),
| https://changelog.com/jsparty/339
| troymc wrote:
| If you like WordPress and want to use it to create a static site,
| you can.
|
| 1. Run a local installation of WordPress on your PC. For one
| option, see localwp.com (no affiliation).
|
| 2. Use WordPress to design whatever website you want, using
| almost any WordPress plugins you want. Just don't make any calls
| for time-varying external resources!
|
| 3. Use one of the WordPress plugins for exporting a WordPress
| site as a static site, i.e. as a folder of files that you can
| upload to GitHub Pages, Netlify, Neocities, or wherever. For one
| option, see simplystatic.com (no affiliation).
| oddevan wrote:
| I did that for a while, but I kept running into annoying edge
| cases with those plugins (or other wget-based solutions).
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| There is no paradox at all: simplicity is beautiful but
| complexity sells. The author thinks that value come from realized
| utility. However, in most market segments, value came from
| perception. With complexity (even useless ones), you can boost
| perceived value. How do you impress people when all the greatness
| is under the hood?
|
| I use several SSGs and wrote one myself. I still can't recommend
| any SSG to people willing to pay.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The author thinks that value come from realized utility.
|
| For the majority of the world, Wordpress indeed does provide
| more utility than an SSG. Wordpress is famous for their 5
| minute installs, and then everything _just works_.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| _realized_ utility.
|
| Also, the article is about fully managed Wordpress vs self-
| hosted (or PaaS hosted) SSG. If the choice is between self-
| hosted Wordpress vs self-hosted SSG, I bet the outcome will
| be very different.
|
| Now, you may wonder why the OP was not make an apple to apple
| comparison, like fully managed Wordpress vs fully managed
| SSG. Well, fully managed SSG does not exists, because it
| won't sell!
| stared wrote:
| It seems that people pay for Ghost,
| https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| The killer app of WordPress is comments. No SSG, almost by
| definition, allows comments; WordPress blogs almost always come
| with them built in.
|
| If you want something like Hugo to really take off in the
| blogging sphere, all you need to do is create some good looking
| themes _with comments_. Figure that out at scale - maybe by using
| per-blog sharded SQLite, which you can host as a third party for
| pennies on the dollar - and you have a tiny golden goose on your
| hands.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't think so. Comments used to be a big deal, but these
| days you sign up to handle a lot of spam and moderation issues.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Can't you just spin up an imageboard instance and put a button
| at the bottom of an article?
| corry wrote:
| I think that was true during the age of the blog, but far less
| so now.
|
| Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-
| party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many
| of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs.
| will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same
| post?
|
| IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be
| higher quality for a tech-related post than a comment chain on
| a specific post, since HN has already attracted a wider set of
| readers than 99.9% of all blogs.
|
| The main advantage of commenting directly on a blog post is
| that the author is far more likely to see it vs. the ephemeral
| state of the post being on the HN front-page.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The more people join a social media site the worse the
| conversation gets.
|
| This is already happening to HN as tech people flee Reddit.
|
| Most of the new comments on any given post are people that
| didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff
| addressed in the second paragraph.
|
| This is an evolutionary process where the commenters that get
| the most engagement are those that are first to respond or
| react. First-mover advantage entrenches itself as those posts
| are boosted higher due to the engagement they receive.
|
| Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged
| when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of
| first impressions.
|
| This reward cycle is amplified by more people, because
| engagement is very unequal on platforms that share a top
| comment or front page for everyone. You either make it to the
| first few comments or get nothing at all.
|
| Sites like Discord or Facebook try to counteract the
| monopolization of engagement by an impulsive few by splitting
| users into smaller groups. Less competition for social
| interaction creates more diversity in winning strategies.
| Evolutionary pressures still exist, but you don't need to
| perfect a "winning strategy" solely to interact with other
| people on the platform.
|
| Contrast Reddit or YouTube videos. The concentration of
| attention means it has monetary value due to SEO, product
| reviews, or advertising. The value of a large audience makes
| a platform more competitive. Competitiveness means many
| YouTubers and Redditors professionalize attention-seeking
| behaviour. This comes at the cost of quality.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| Like our ancestors before us.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| Syonyk wrote:
| Grate post! Hey, check my websight about "WordPress blogs" at
| https://www.sevarg.net/ I think youll like it! ;)
|
| Are you _sure_ comments are still desirable? Isn 't step 1 of
| the internet anymore "Never read the comments"?
|
| That said, I did actually work out a solution for "static site
| with dynamic comments" on my blog that could easily be done for
| a lot of people if they're willing to use a hosted service.
| Discourse (the modern forum software that a lot of places moved
| to after PHPBB) has a way to integrate with pages for comments,
| and so I've been using that for at least three years now with
| no real trouble. I host my own Discourse install (I'm weird, I
| still have a server racked up in a datacenter), but there's no
| reason you couldn't pay someone else to do that and provide
| comments.
|
| Interestingly, the amount of spam I've gotten with my Discourse
| comments is a tiny fraction the amount I got even with Blogger
| back when I was hosting there. It's just not a big problem
| anymore for me, and it was a constant annoyance with PHPBB
| forums and Blogger.
|
| The rest of the site is just Jekyll, based around a template I
| bought (because I can't make a decent looking website). I've
| then hacked on it a lot over the years to make it do things I
| want (responsive images, mostly - I'm still sensitive to people
| on low bandwidth connections), but it's not bad at all in terms
| of maintenance. Just launch a render job and some scripts
| upload the new files.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Are you sure comments are still desirable? Isn't step 1 of
| the internet anymore "Never read the comments"?
|
| It very much depends on who you ask. As a reader, I _always_
| check the comments on an article. It 's easily 75% of the fun
| of the Internet to me, more so if it's a shitshow. I can
| understand not everyone feels the same. I've been hearing for
| years from many different people how Twitter is a garbage
| dump, but to me it's no worse or better than any other place
| where people can respond to each other.
| fph wrote:
| Of course if you ask this question 3 levels deep in a
| comment thread this is the kind of answers you are going to
| get; survivor bias.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I'm looking at going static and this is literally the problem I
| have. Is there any out-of-the-box way (e.g. something in
| Javascript) to bolt comments onto a static site?
| psd1 wrote:
| Perhaps Disqus? I believe it's opaque to the site owner -
| users auth to Disqus, you don't need a db.
| sphars wrote:
| There's several solutions for comments, as documented here:
| https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
| Kye wrote:
| Disqus solved this for a while, but they did various things
| over the years to push people away:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus#Criticism,_privacy,_and...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22disqus%22
|
| Facebook offered a commenting system a lot of sites used, but
| it also lost trust and reach with its scandals.
| tlavoie wrote:
| There are similar-ish tools such as Isso. Self-hosted, no
| snooping, stored on SQLite. https://isso-comments.de/
| janalsncm wrote:
| The killer app for Wordpress isn't comments, it's their plugin
| ecosystem. Everything you'd spend a weekend configuring in Hugo
| has a plugin in Wordpress that your mom could enable in two
| clicks.
|
| I use Hugo myself, but the user experience is much friendlier
| in Wordpress even if the footprint is unnecessary from an
| engineering perspective.
| alemanek wrote:
| You can use GitHub issues for each blog post and then use it
| for comments. See here: https://www.richyhbm.co.uk/posts/using-
| github-issues-as-comm...
| smitelli wrote:
| Honestly, the last thing I want is to allow randos unfettered
| access to deface my personal site. Maybe it brings value to
| somebody somewhere, but my mental health got better when I
| finally turned them off for good.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Another "interactive" part: contact forms.
|
| Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably
| want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an
| alternative, but handling the input pipeline is better.
|
| On a static site that requires finding a service they trust to
| handle the submission and correctly plug it in their site. It
| becomes another moving part, potentially another bill that
| needs to be paid separately, another bit to deal with when the
| industry consolidates etc.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > And so, while we software engineers enjoy free hosting & custom
| domain support with GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages / etc
|
| Oh come on! You don't really expect that to last, do you?
|
| Learned back in 2004 that it's better to pay than to rely on free
| services. I pay for source code repositories, email, web hosting,
| etc.
| echoangle wrote:
| What's the worst that can happen when using free hosting? As
| soon as they start charging money, you just leave for somewhere
| else. And I say that as someone who is paying for a VPS for
| hosting (and some other stuff).
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's true for all free stuff. It's a pain to constantly
| monitor if the service is still free, and a pain to keep
| migrating.
|
| Web hosting is very cheap - especially for static sites. Much
| easier to pay and forget about it. I've used my provider for
| 20 years.
| echoangle wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the provider will tell the users once they
| start charging money, they want to convert them to paid
| customers after all. And migrating a static site every
| couple of years wouldn't bother me too much either. If you
| value the time with your hourly income, it's probably not
| worth it, but if it's fun, it's fine.
| wvenable wrote:
| I fit into that Paradox -- I rewrote my own personal website in
| modern PHP without a framework or database. It's mostly a static
| site but uses PHP to add headers, deal with lists (for blog
| posts), etc. I found it slightly more convenient to be not
| _completely_ static. I can just write up an article, commit,
| push, and it 's online. I found most static site generators to be
| far too complicated.
|
| The code for a single page looks like this:
| <?php $this->title = "Blog Article Title";
| $this->shortTitle = "Title"; $this->date =
| mktime(0,0,0,1,27,2024); if ($this->mode ==
| PageMode::Meta) return; ?> <p>Raw HTML
| content here<p>
|
| There is a router that automatically adds the site header and
| footer, and I can add a "_layout.php" file to a folder to add
| another level of layout for child pages. For blog list page, it
| just scans all the individual article files in the folder to
| create the index. That where that _$this- >mode ==
| PageMode::Meta_ comes in -- it executes the code in each file (to
| get the meta data) and then exits before rendering the rest. It's
| not going to scale to a lot of content but I'll adjust if it
| becomes an issue.
|
| The entire PHP code for my "framework" is only 4 PHP files
| (init.php, functions.php, Layout.php, and Page.php).
|
| The advantage of being a developer is that you can use code
| instead of configuration or data. And you can use code to write
| content more efficiently.
|
| The result (still quite incomplete) is this:
| https://www.codaris.com/
| ohpls wrote:
| I've just started doing the same for one of my websites, 90%
| html but php for headers and include() for a few odd global
| bits.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| If you cache the rendered content then almost all of the
| advantages of a static site go away, particularly if you are a
| platform and can amortize the infrastructure cost over all your
| users.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| You say all of the advantages go away, but I read, "if you put
| in extra work you can achieve some of what static sites get for
| free".
|
| Which is kind of funny as the main advantage of static sites is
| fewer things to worry about.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| The article is about how static sites are too complicated for
| normal people to set up, so people aren't getting those
| benefits for free because it's too hard for them to do.
|
| Edit: The other thing is that non-technical users want a
| WYSIWYG editor. They don't want to edit markdown or html text
| files. So once you have all the infrastructure in place to
| support that it's not really any more complicated to make
| your customers' webpages dynamic as well.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Phenomenon acknowledged but
|
| "normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make
| them pay "
|
| Here we go again, software needs to be free as in beer and anyone
| that charges for software is the devil
|
| "software engineers enjoy free hosting & custom domain support
| with GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages "
|
| You get what you pay for buddy.
| castillar76 wrote:
| Yep, definitely agree. I've started a couple sites recently and
| quickly found that while _I_ was happy just generating them with
| an SSG and slapping them up online, as soon as I wanted to
| collaborate with others the SSG had to go right out the window in
| favor of WordPress. It 's not that SSGs can't be collaborative,
| mind you, it's that it's _far_ easier to give someone a limited-
| access login to a WP site and let them contribute articles than
| it is to try to teach someone who isn 't a programmer how to
| navigate adding things to an SSG.
|
| Consider what's needed for someone non-programmer-y to use an
| SSG:
|
| * Download a copy of the repository and install the SSG tooling,
| then fire up the SSG in listening mode so they can see their
| changes. * Write out the Markdown for their page. Oh, hope you
| have short-codes in place for things like images-next-to-
| paragraphs, info callouts, common page structures (cards, hero
| blocks, buttons), and so forth. If not, either they'll have to
| pause and get you to work with them to have them implemented, or
| they'll have to figure out writing the templates required.
| Regardless, once the bits are implemented in the site the writer
| has to work in the arcane short-code format markup required to
| include them. * Now they've got their changes, they need to
| figure out how to stage them -- either they need to zip up the
| whole working directory and send it to you to sort out, or they
| get to learn how to commit a pull-request to a Git repository.
|
| _I_ don 't mind doing all of that -- it's quite enjoyable to
| figure out, and I get the chance to structure things exactly as I
| like them. But trying to teach a theatre director accustomed to
| writing in Google Docs how to do all of that? Nope. Which then
| turns into, "here, I wrote this out in G-Docs -- hope you can
| figure out how to turn that into a site page!".
|
| I really do wish there were a better competitor to WordPress,
| something that offered the ability to lift the hood and customize
| more easily. There are some CMS front-ends to SSGs, but the last
| I checked they either were more "CMS" in the sense of "put stuff
| in database and this will render it" or they still weren't
| particularly user-friendly (or were abandoned).
| nitwit005 wrote:
| This is an engineer's view of simplicity.
|
| A normal human being is going to see something like a checkbox to
| enable comments as being amazingly simple.
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's not really a paradox when you consider the UX from the
| website owner's perspective. Wordpress makes things stupid simple
| to do, even if it has way more overhead.
|
| It's only a paradox if you think the trade off is spending time
| configuring things. No, the alternative for most people would be
| to pay someone to set up their website.
|
| If someone set up a WYSIWYG editor for Hugo that goes from domain
| registration to published site in a few clicks they'd make a
| fortune.
| rpgbr wrote:
| You just described Micro.blog[1], don't you?
|
| [1] https://micro.blog
| burningChrome wrote:
| >>> If someone set up a WYSIWYG editor for Hugo that goes from
| domain registration to published site in a few clicks they'd
| make a fortune.
|
| Isn't this what companies like Netlify, Squarespace and Github
| Pages does? I know with Netlify, you can transfer a parked
| domain, pick a template and it does a majority of the config
| for you and you're up and running in a few mins and then it
| takes about 24 hours for the domain to go through.
|
| I get what you're saying though, even with those companies who
| are close to what you're talking about, taking care of those
| minor middlemen steps would be a boon to someone who could
| figure it out.
| simonw wrote:
| The fix for this is GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. That way you
| don't have to run any software yourself at all - the build
| process runs entirely on GitHub for you, and it's free as well.
|
| I'm surprised I haven't come across more examples of people using
| GitHub Actions with static site generators like this. Ideally
| someone would share a GitHub repository template that comes pre-
| configured with a good static site generator which people could
| then use as a one-click starting point for their own sites.
|
| I've considered building one of those myself but I tend not to
| use static site generators (I like Baked Data instead:
| https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/baked-data/) so I'm not a
| great person to take on that project.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| The GitHub Pages splash page (https://pages.github.com/) has a
| nice little interactive tutorial for just that, and I've seen
| plenty of repo templates for various SSGs/themes, but I think a
| lot of users still run into the following hurdles:
|
| - Not knowing what GitHub is or how it works (let alone Git
| itself)
|
| - Not knowing how to clone a repo
|
| - Not knowing what program you need to modify the files in a
| repo, or how to use it
|
| - Not knowing how to make/push commits
|
| - Not knowing how to build local previews to see your changes
| before they take effect
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| CMSes like Bludit are a good option for users who want a simpler
| structure and a small footprint. Themes are still very limited
| though.
| dimal wrote:
| We're dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell
| service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G,
| and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information
| would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news
| sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website
| finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected
| it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k of jQuery blocking
| rendering. It's great that people are doing this work, but
| citizens needed this a week and a half ago. By now, I've figured
| out where to get water, food, non potable water, etc. Seeing tech
| fail so badly through all this has been eye opening for me, in a
| depressing way.
| dingnuts wrote:
| that situation has had me thinking about getting an amateur
| radio license again. In a disaster like what happened to
| Western NC, which encompasses a much greater area than just
| Asheville, I wouldn't want to rely on anything based on the
| Internet. You want something with a long wavelength and low
| power. But it's so inaccessible, and I'm not sure if it's for
| good reason or not.
|
| Connectivity was knocked out from Black Mountain all the way to
| the Tennessee and Georgia borders. I'd be surprised if many
| people even have shitty 3G back yet. What I know is remaining
| in touch with people who live there has been hard.
| jachee wrote:
| CB is roughly 11m wavelength and doesn't require a ton of
| power, and doesn't require any licensing.
| codethief wrote:
| > a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page
| Application and then performs navigation by requesting the
| content in JSON form, which then gets "rehydrated" client-side.
|
| Huh? <confused-dog.jpg> Either the page gets rendered server-side
| and (possibly) hydrated client-side, or it gets rendered client-
| side (i.e. a classic SPA) but then there is no hydration.
| meiraleal wrote:
| the "hydrated" means that external objects (JSON) are added to
| the running SPA.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| This is what drove me away from static sites. It's actually more
| work because you have to be the one to do all the stuff.
|
| Sure, there are a few options for hosting and generating the
| build, but when I tried, they were not that good, or had some
| issues, etc... Meanwhile, wordpress.com never disappointed, and
| has an app for iOS and Android that you can use to update stuff
| whenever you are - as long as you have internet, of course.
|
| That's why nowadays I use Obsidian Publish. Of course, I could
| use Quartz or some other alternative for building a site from my
| obsidian vault but... none will just work out of the box, from
| your phone
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| There is no such thing as perfect software. Everything comes with
| tradeoffs. Except, of course, for mkdocs.
|
| I know other people like jekyll or hugo or whatever, but I've
| never seen anything comparable to the simplicity of mkdocs. It
| has built in search for the entire site, nice looking nav,
| everything is markdown.
|
| The best part though? Here's my "build pipeline".
|
| $ mkdocs build
|
| $ scp -r ./build <user>@dangerlibrary.com:/site
|
| I love it.
| dfex wrote:
| > ...the web used to be more interesting when more of it was made
| by people different from us
|
| And there it is, beautifully distilled into one sentence.
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