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Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

sitesauce.app

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#61
post #28

I've browsed the site and didn't see how are forms handled?

Bottom of the front page: > Sitesauce recommends the use of JAMstack-friendly alternatives to this services. For example, you could move your contact forms to StaticKit or your comments to Commento. > However, there are times where the only option is to rely on your backend. For this, you can configure Sitesauce to proxy certain endpoints to your backend. You can also use this if you need to fetch some data from your…

Thank you! All I could think about was contact forms and other opportunities intakes. Missed that.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#62
post #47

Landing page feedback: the backend that keeps changing (“like X-powered websites”) could cause the whole page to jump. This is very annoying on narrow viewports (e.g. mobile), especially when I’m reading text, for instance the FAQ.

And super nitpick but the font used connects s and t and it really looks out of place to me.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#63
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. So the bigger question then is what happens when they change this? Or go away. Also, have you seen what "Additionally, different hard limits apply for each plan." means on their pricing page[1]? Domain limits, maximum files, etc? What those might mean when you scale beyond expectation? I don't mean to discourage. But big vendors pull the rug out from under people all the time, sometimes ruining a business beca…

Yeah, that's almost worse. It means Sitesauce is relying on the generosity of their vendor for their business model to work.

Well they could also connect to upload to s3, netlify, github pages, GitLab pages, to name the free or pretty cheap static hosts I can think of!

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#64

Wow, good job! As a fellow teenager, it really encourages me that it's possible to launch something successfully without making it your full-time job :)

There is absolutely no reason a teenager can’t nail these sorts of projects. And often being young has some big advantages in terms of not having got too comfortable with a salaried job and knowing what the next generation wants.

My advice (teenager or not) is join online communities like indie hackers and get all the help because anyone doing this at any age needs to learn diverse skills, it’s not just about having an idea and coding.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#65
post #14
post #2

...any backend that is a content-heavy website? Or are they somehow also abstracting away the application logic? How is this different from a CDN cache?

The way it abstracts application logic is by finding out what parts of your site can be immutable functions, then produces all the variations of static content for each possible input.

Seems like static site generation for non-programmers, maybe.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#66
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emm.. doesn’t proxy cache give like the same result?

No. Proxy cache was our first approach. Proxy cache solves the performance problem. There's also the issue of code mess in most Wordpress themes. We used Pagespeed as reference and our score -with- proxy cache was about 60. Once we re-wrote the theme in our static site framework, the Pagespeed score was 95. Could I have achieved the same with PHP? Probably. The biggest problem is Wordpress doesn't have an MVC like fr…

I genuinely don't understand. Proxy cache web server sends static html from ssd/RAM. Static site framework web server sends html from ssd/RAM. How is that different?

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#67
post #55
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cute story, but what was -actual- the cost (time, monetary and opportunity) in building your own CMS instead of applying basic performance tweaks to an off the shelf system?

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,…

> For starters, this is a media company, so they would like to have instantly updated posts on certain parts of their site.

How are their posts instantly updated using a static site generator? Don’t get me wrong, I was sold on in static site generators years ago. But not understanding this argument.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#68
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cute story, but what was -actual- the cost (time, monetary and opportunity) in building your own CMS instead of applying basic performance tweaks to an off the shelf system?

Well I had to do our corporate team site and got so frustrated with SharePoint that I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files. It was a couple of days of work. It runs behind nginx and automatically updated on GitHub commit of new content. Bootstrap is very well documented and you can use rst directives for “widgets”. I am in the process of moving to markdown + yaml now to make writing content ev…

> I coded a script in python to generate the html from rst files

There’s an outstanding and fairly flexible static site generator for rst files in Python that’s been around for quite a long time, called Sphinx. It’s basically a docs generator but I’ve used it as a generic static site generator.

Re: Show HN: Generate a static website from any back end

#69
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Proxy cache was our first approach. Proxy cache solves the performance problem. There's also the issue of code mess in most Wordpress themes. We used Pagespeed as reference and our score -with- proxy cache was about 60. Once we re-wrote the theme in our static site framework, the Pagespeed score was 95. Could I have achieved the same with PHP? Probably. The biggest problem is Wordpress doesn't have an MVC like fr…

I genuinely don't understand. Proxy cache web server sends static html from ssd/RAM. Static site framework web server sends html from ssd/RAM. How is that different?

If your theme is bad, the HTML it generates is also bad. That's why. Next, proxy cache doesn't work well for news sites for example that have constantly updated articles and sections of the website by the minute.
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