Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

Interesting product! But I find the font really annoying especially the st ligature.

I can answer that, since I also made a small static site generator from scratch in python.

I was using another static site generator (Hexo), but at some point I wanted to change some things and add some custom html to my posts. Since the documentation was ... well ... minimalistic on some aspects, I also spent some time looking at the source code. But at that point I was really wondering what benefit I still had from using that generator.

In the end, all a static site generator does is collecting some markdown or RST files, converting them to html and putting that into a template html file. And generating some lists (index page, RSS, ...) and some metadata for SEO. So it took me a single Saturday to make a working static site generator and now I can do anything I want without looking up documentation or source code, since it's my own dumpster fire :-)

This static site project didn't cost much for my client. I wrote the entire engine over a span of close to 2 years using my personal time over the weekends, trying to re-write it in different languages, frameworks, etc.I did a re-write in all possible methods out there - Including Jekyll, Middleman, Hugo, etc. In the end, I settled with Elixir / Phoenix. Money, if you factor in my personal time valued at $X00 USD/hr, then yeah, multiply that with 8 hours a weekend for 2 years, that was probably the cost. For my clients? Just about a month. The clients didn't lose any opportunity because of this move. They were still on Wordpress as this was being tailored for them.

These OTS static site generators are fine for small sites, but at the scale of our clients who have more than 30k posts and counting, none of these would be able to handle it. When I say handle it, I also am referring the time taken to generate 30,000 posts in the shortest possible time. In a custom solution, you're able to optimize this heavily. I brought it down to 30 minutes from 1.5 hours for 30k posts.

Why not simply add a caching layer infront of a Wordpress instance? For starters, this is a media company, so they would like to have instantly updated posts on certain parts of their site. For that, you need to disable caching. Which means tens of thousands of requests are hitting your instance every minute. So, that means you need a high performance server + SQL instance (Expensive). It worked out to $3000USD per month just for servers alone.

The static site generator use just $100/month instance, for comparison. Of course, there is also the development cost for the client for this solution, but I can comfortably share that their ROI would be less than a year if you factor just server costs alone.

There are many other bonuses with a custom static solution - Your whole theme can be broken down into an MVC paradigm which makes future integrations super clean and easy. Codebase maintainability also has improved drastically - partly because of the language itself (Elixir) and partly because of the MVC architecture.

Requiring a credit card before any functionality is enabled breaks the WordPress.org plugin directory guidelines.

To be compliant, the 7-day free trial should be possible without having to provide credit card details.

That is, in any case, best practice, unless profiting from people who forget to cancel is an important part of your business plan.

Google docs also has options to export to markdown.