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Static site hosting hurdles

notes.volution.ro

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Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#171

Post by ciprian_craciun »

schemescape wrote: post #170
ciprian_craciun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just use GoatCounter https://www.goatcounter.com/ >; it's simple to deploy it yourself (it's open-source), but it's also free to use it hosted, and it seems to be quite privacy friendly (if one could call a web analytics solution as such). If you are already using CloudFlare, they have a (free and) simple enough web analytics solution. (They say they are also privacy friendly, but given it's not open-source…

I forgot to specify my goal when asking about HTTP logs: I want to get some basic analytics without adding anything to my HTML. I love Goat Counter, but I still have to add a tracker (a privacy friendly one, but a tracker nonetheless). Cloudflare looks like it might actually provide what I'm looking for, but the price is a bit too high for my low traffic hobby projects (looks like it starts at $20/month). I could jus…

No, with Cloudflare you can use for free the "web analytics" product; you can even use it for any site, not only those hosted at CloudFlare. (Perhaps what you've seen is the "cache analytics" or "traffic analytics" which indeed are payed.)

(I use it "web analytics" on my own site thus I can confirm that it's free.)

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#172

Post by forrestthewoods »

pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #144
forrestthewoods wrote: post #11

Yeah I went with Netlify for my static site because I have zero desire to ever been an IT admin. I do skip the static generator part and go with artisinally hand crafted HTML/CSS/JS instead. It’s radically simpler and ultimately better imho.

How do you get your content into Netlify? They push the CI/CD angle pretty hard (sometimes to the exclusion of other things; e.g. bugs in the CLI that break things if you aren't on their expected/happy path) and the fetishization of GitHub-integrated CI/CD leads to stuff that is about as complex as the traditional undesirable IT overhead.

My static website is in a private GitHub repo. I simply push to that.

Because my site is not statically generated there’s no real complexity here? When I’m working on it locally I simply open a .html file from my local drive in a browser. When I’m done I push to GitHub and Netlify updates in seconds.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#173

Post by schemescape »

ciprian_craciun wrote: post #171
schemescape wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forgot to specify my goal when asking about HTTP logs: I want to get some basic analytics without adding anything to my HTML. I love Goat Counter, but I still have to add a tracker (a privacy friendly one, but a tracker nonetheless). Cloudflare looks like it might actually provide what I'm looking for, but the price is a bit too high for my low traffic hobby projects (looks like it starts at $20/month). I could jus…

No, with Cloudflare you can use for free the "web analytics" product; you can even use it for any site, not only those hosted at CloudFlare. (Perhaps what you've seen is the "cache analytics" or "traffic analytics" which indeed are payed.) (I use it "web analytics" on my own site thus I can confirm that it's free.)

Their site indicates that the free tier requires adding a JavaScript beacon (which is what I’m trying to avoid).

Is that what you’re using? Or did I misread their offering (which seemed to clearly indicate a paid plan was required for the non-JavaScript analytics)?

See at the bottom how it says “sign up for a paid plan” in the section that says “there is no code to add”:

https://www.cloudflare.com/web-analytics/

Edit: Oh, you're the OP! Just checked out your site and you are indeed using their JavaScript beacon. I know I'm being unreasonable, but in my case, I'm going for no JavaScript, and no trackers (so some sort of request logging on the server or proxy side is likely my only option). It's my attempt to "be the change you want to see in the world".

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#175

Post by bitexploder »

doodlesdev wrote: post #79
bitexploder wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the updates run automatically. Put certbot on a cron. Ride it until ubuntu LTS I am on dies. So easy. :)

You can also use Caddy in place of NGINX and let it handle Lets Encrypt for you :)

I hadn’t really touched caddy in a while. For a static site I may just do that if my cron script ever falls over. I was also feeling hipster and wanted to play with Justine’s redbean. It is sort of appealing to just drop a binary off somewhere and be done with it, but like `apt install nginx` is also trivial as a user :)

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#176

Post by ciprian_craciun »

schemescape wrote: post #173
ciprian_craciun wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, with Cloudflare you can use for free the "web analytics" product; you can even use it for any site, not only those hosted at CloudFlare. (Perhaps what you've seen is the "cache analytics" or "traffic analytics" which indeed are payed.) (I use it "web analytics" on my own site thus I can confirm that it's free.)

Their site indicates that the free tier requires adding a JavaScript beacon (which is what I’m trying to avoid). Is that what you’re using? Or did I misread their offering (which seemed to clearly indicate a paid plan was required for the non-JavaScript analytics)? See at the bottom how it says “sign up for a paid plan” in the section that says “there is no code to add”: https://www.cloudflare.com/web-analytics/ Edit…

Yes, the Cloudflare web-analytics does require JavaScript.

With regard to no-JavaScript sites I understand; and for example the only JS on my site is the one for GoatCounter and Cloudflare web-analytics. GoatCounter does fallback nicely in case of no-JavaScript, meanwhile Cloudflare just doesn't work.

However, with regard to Cloudflare web-analytics, given that I already serve my site through them, there is no privacy lost by also using their analytics.

GoatCounter is good for assessing a long-term picture regarding readership, meanwhile CloudFlare is good for assessing performance issues.

Also note that if one registers a domain with Google for their webmaster tools (previously called Search Console?), although one doesn't use any of the Google services on the site, just because your visitors are using Chrome you can get performance metrics that way... So that's that about privacy... :)

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#178

Post by adriangrigore »

chubot wrote: post #23

Uh what's wrong with shared hosting? I use Dreamhost but there are dozens of others. It costs less than $10/month and I've used it since 2009. I think the industry (or part of a generation of programmers) somehow collectively forgot that it exists. I don't see any mention of it in the article -- it solves the problem exactly. It easily serves and survives all the spikes from Hacker News that my site gets. Shared host…

Shell is what I use to generate my sites also https://mkws.sh! Very simple, very eficient!

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#179

Post by nerdponx »

Dalewyn wrote: post #37
doliveira wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating! Young people struggling with files and folders just like my Mom does.

It's really not surprising. The most familiar computer to young people, their smartphone, does everything to hide and abstract away the file system and even the fact that it's a computer. When someone doesn't even realize a concept exists, it shouldn't come as a surprise they will struggle.

More cynicism is warranted here. "Platform companies" like Google and Apple love it when users fail to understand how their devices work, because they get locked-in to the plaftorms. This is the successful end result of a long campaign of deliberate miseducation of users.

Re: Static site hosting hurdles

#180

Post by pdimitar »

notpushkin wrote: post #143
dragontamer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, you lost me at "static site generator". WTF? Just write the damn HTML and CSS yourself, it's static after all. At a minimum, static site generators create indexes, table-of-contents, tags, sorts by date, and other such features. Pretty much no one writes good, raw, HTML these days. Documentation is written Sphinx, texinfo, docbook, and many other formats. Why? Because compiling chapters (or pages) together…

My website [1] is good raw (X)HTML [2]. It's just a couple of pages though, nothing fancy. If I was keeping a blog or something, I would definitely go for an SSG. [1]: https://notpushk.in/ [2]: https://gitlab.com/notpushkin/notpushk.in

> It's just a couple of pages though, nothing fancy

Nope. Anything I can have a machine generate for me is fancy if I have to write it by hand.

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