Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#131

Post by gsempe » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

Spacemolte wrote: post #36

Any particular reason why you don't install using homebrew?

The only reason is that this way I can stick to a Hugo version and make my environment completely reproductible. Cf. the jump-start script in the repository https://github.com/gsempe/gsempe.github.io/blob/source/jump_...

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#132

Post by RUG3Y » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:43 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #59

tbrock wrote: post #54

Holy cow. Is this an improvement? Remember in 1999 when you could get a static website up in 3 minutes using ftp?

I made my first website using vi to make an index.html file in the ~/public_html directory in the home directory of my account on a university Solaris server back in 1997. FTP was a luxury. Kids today.

This is how I remember website development. Those were extremely fun and exciting times. 1997 was my freshman year of high school. Geocities and Anglefire FTW.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#133

Post by RUG3Y » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #88

Lord_Zero wrote: post #43

I wrote a similar blog post: https://tberra.com/aws/amazon/meta/2016/11/12/the-birth-of-a... The main differences on mine are: - I use Jekyll, which is ranked #1 in the static site generator space. - Hosted on AWS S3. - CloudFront in front of S3. - Routing and aliases handled by Route53. - Deployed using a tool called s3_websites (change detection only uploading generated files AND cloud front cache invalidation for…

I see both Jekyll and Hugo mentioned frequently in the "Using GitHub and X to host your website" space. Do you have any practical our technical reasons for preferring one over the other?

If you're not already set up with a Ruby development environment, I'd use pick Hugo over Jekyll. Jekyll is nice but getting all the Ruby junk going was annoying, IMO. Maybe it's trivial for someone better than me.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#134

Post by LolWolf » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:46 PM UTC

RUG3Y wrote: post #130

tbrock wrote: post #54

Holy cow. Is this an improvement? Remember in 1999 when you could get a static website up in 3 minutes using ftp?

Using Hugo adds a lot of complexity. I'm using Surge.sh and raw html/css, I can have a site up in under 2 minutes. I think I spent less than an hour on my blog (it has a very simple layout).

What does it look like/is it customizable? I've been looking to host a math/CS blog somewhere outside of Tumblr (which is great for getting an audience and interacting with people, but totally useless for actually being able to write math, unless you want to embed JPEGs everywhere) and make it as simple as possible.

This article seemed like a good start, but I'd love to know more about how you built your blog in a way that's easily maintainable.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#135

Post by RUG3Y » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

plg wrote: post #109

Benefit above and beyond writing your own html and css? (Serious question). I see a lot of the example tutorials show a simple blog example. In this case why not just html and css and your favourite text editor? With css you can separate style from content, you can "change themes" etc.

This is exactly what I decided to do. Adding some posts manually to an html file is really not onerous, and the setup time and complexity of the project directory are near zero. Plus, I don't have to take the time to understand someone else's theme in order to make changes. Whipping up a simple css theme is really not difficult.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#136

Post by tony101 » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 5:56 PM UTC

Note that in this setup, the connection between Cloudflare and GitHub is plaintext / not secure, because by default Cloudflare uses "Flexible SSL".

It is possible to make it more secure by changing the setting to "Full SSL (non-strict)", which encrypts the connection between Cloudflare and GitHub against passive attacks but not active interception. Unfortunately, GitHub pages does not work with Cloudflare's "Full SSL (strict)" option.

Cloudflare SSL Options: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170416-W...

Example of attack between Cloudflare and origin: https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo...

GitHub issue page: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#137

Post by dhimes » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

j_s wrote: post #114

bluetwo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to clarify what a down vote is... My assumption was it was to flag something mean or off topic. Now People seem to use it to say "I disagree with your opinion but am too lazy to express my own".

Ask HN: Why has the downvoting timelimit been reduced? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330029 (Aug 2016) TL;DR: I think it would be a big mistake to [...] outlaw downvoting for disagreement - dang (HN mod)

Yeah pg agrees with that. In the early days downvoting for disagreement was discouraged among the heavier users, but things change.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#138

Post by nerdponx » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

douglasfshearer wrote: post #72

Neocities [0] does all of this! - It's free (though you can become a supporter and get some extra benefits) [1] - It's fast, since it uses it's own CDN. [2] - It's secure, all pages support SSL, even with custom domains. [3] - It has a command line tool [4] that can be wrapped to automate upload of pages, or used in a Git hook. - It has a plethora of learning resources [5]. [0] https://neocities.org [1] https://neoci…

Nice, thanks for posting. I'm using Gitlab Pages right now, and it's fine, but having my deploy process depend on Git is kind of weird. Plus Gitlab isn't really a web host: they're a Git host. I'll definitely check this out soon.

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#139

Post by rdiddly » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

option_greek wrote: post #61

pc86 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming your blog is technical, this would have been a good chance to get some more traffic by at least mentioning the actual domain, linking to the github repo, or having one or both of those in your profile. Edit: Not sure why this has been met with a stream of downvotes. Is there something wrong with saying "I use a different approach to publish this blog: [link]," especially if it's technical and would be of int…

"Edit 2: I don't generally care where a post is but this went from -2 to +6 pretty quickly. Weird?" Probably I can answer that :) I noticed that when one of my posts get down voted even when having a neutral comment, it swings back to positive fast when touching -1 or -2. I guess that the gray comment takes a while for HN'ers to notice as down voted. And when they find that there is nothing wrong with it or they actu…

"Defensive upvoting," you might call it. I've certainly done it.

I've also seen many of my own comments go up and down quite a lot as the upvoters & downvoters battle it out. (Eventually they tend to settle on a solid "meh.")

Re: Building a fast, secured and free static site in less than three hours

#140

Post by seanwilson » Tue, Sep 12, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #88

Lord_Zero wrote: post #43

I wrote a similar blog post: https://tberra.com/aws/amazon/meta/2016/11/12/the-birth-of-a... The main differences on mine are: - I use Jekyll, which is ranked #1 in the static site generator space. - Hosted on AWS S3. - CloudFront in front of S3. - Routing and aliases handled by Route53. - Deployed using a tool called s3_websites (change detection only uploading generated files AND cloud front cache invalidation for…

I see both Jekyll and Hugo mentioned frequently in the "Using GitHub and X to host your website" space. Do you have any practical our technical reasons for preferring one over the other?

Having used both quite a lot, I much prefer Jekyll's template language as it's easier to use and more readable. It's a lot easier to install plugins to extend Jekyll as well. However, Hugo coming in a single binary makes it easy to get working when you come back to a site you've not updated in a while (my Jekyll toolchain was a combination of Ruby + Node + Gulp that felt brittle but could be improved with some work), it's suppose to be significantly faster (I've seen people saying it takes Hugo seconds to generate thousands of posts compared to minutes with Jekyll) and I've had less issues with Hugo's watch feature (Jekyll doesn't refresh when you change files sometimes for me). I don't use a lot of plugins or complex templates so the speed and simplicity of Hugo is a big factor for me.