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Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

offbase.org

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Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#71
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, many always start with the premise "hosting is hard", but maybe this was true 20 years ago, now hosting providers let you spin-up a server in a few clicks, have monitoring, alerts, automatic updates and more. The good part is that for 99.99% of the time, once you set-up a server it could keep on running without issues for many years. I am not a sys-admin but I have used multiple hosting providers (shared, VP…

True, sadly shared hosting still limit with capped disk IO and bandwidth at a premium price which would be similar or more than competitive VPS in performance. I'm still looking out for competitive VPS provider other than UpCloud if you have any recommendations.

Look at BuyVM, OVH (SoYouStart/Kimsufi), Netcup.eu. All very solid providers and I have servers/VMs with all of them.

..or even Oracle Cloud Always Free Tier (which gives you 2x 1G VMs)

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#72
I recently moved my personal website (https://chrxr.com) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion.

I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up.

I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $15 per month to ~$1-2 per month. All I'm paying for is If I want to add content, I spin up the ECS task again and work away. Note that part of the reason for such a low cost is my website get VERY little traffic :)

Apart from the cost, I also have the advantage that it's lightning quick most of the time, with caching provided by CloudFront.

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#73
post #72

I recently moved my personal website ( https://chrxr.com ) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion. I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up. I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $…

So you’re saying, something like this would save you loads of time? Or do you think it’s unnecessary?

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#74

You may want to rethink the messaging here. From the landing page I'm unsure what type of person would benefit from this and what problem you're solving for them. I already can publish from git directly to Netlify's "distributed CDN." That's the default setup for all static site generators, no? Or is the difference here that you get a CMS editor built-in to your static site?

Chromebook without the Linux partition? Constantly changing devices? ...?

Interesting premise I think, especially if they can make the git experience somewhat more friendly for less technical people.

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#75
post #21

I think this title is askew. The secret sauce here is that this has a GUI CMS that runs without a server. There's plenty of flat file static site generators that don't require a server.

There are also other static site generators with a CMS component. Lektor - https://www.getlektor.com/ - comes to mind.

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#76
post #72

I recently moved my personal website ( https://chrxr.com ) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion. I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up. I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $…

So you’re saying, something like this would save you loads of time? Or do you think it’s unnecessary?

I think this is catering to a specific audience who is not me :) I actually find that the complexity of self hosting is the interesting part.

I did this to learn stuff. Seeing as I have little to say, my blog site is more of a technical playground than a valuable store of content.

I omitted that between the EC2 version and this current version, I built a really convoluted version with an ALB, Aurora, always-on ECS etc. That came to $80 a month. So then that motivated me to go the other way with the super cheap option.

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#77
post #72

I recently moved my personal website ( https://chrxr.com ) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion. I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up. I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $…

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#78
So much complexity to get an HTML page on the internet. IMO the future of data ownership is self hosting from devices like raspberry pi's and upcycled Android phones.

What works now:

* Tunnel proxies[0] like ngrok. You can get an HTML page on the internet in 2 minutes with ngrok.

* Software like Caddy which simplifies certificate management.

What's needed:

* IPv6 and ISPs to drop NAT so we don't need proxies. Good luck.

* More upload throughput. Good luck.

* Services that make it much easier to register a domain name and manage DNS. Should be easier than buying and setting up a phone. This is ripe for the picking.

* Software designed with federated self hosting in mind. Like Inrupt Solid and similar projects.

OT: Text-to-speech has gotten really impressive these days. Took me a solid minute to figure it out.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#79
post #62

I hate to be the person that needs to point it out, but you can't say replace "the cloud with x" and replace "servers with x" and then 500 pixels down the page talk about how you're pushing your static site to a CDN. Perhaps the target audience won't recognize how dishonest that is, but it's still a lie.

The buck stops earlier than that. "Replace the cloud/server with git" - where is git hosted? On your server or the cloud. You're not replacing anything.

I genuinely thought at first that they meant the git repo was hosted in the service worker (like through isomorphic git) and I was like, what if you want to write on a different machine?

Re: Offbase: Static site generator in a browser

#80
post #72

I recently moved my personal website ( https://chrxr.com ) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion. I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up. I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $…

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/

Now I feel bad about my planned two-parter on my elaborate blog setup :)
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