The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
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The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
1–10 of 221 posts
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#2I’m skeptical cheap and easy is something inherent with static sites. I think a dynamic setup can have both those qualities, but there isn’t yet CMS/blog software that hits the sweet spot: self-contained, simple to setup, manage, and host.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#3I run a content website for a living. This year I switched from Craft CMS to my own static site generator.
I no longer think about the server or the CMS. I no longer need to keep it updated. I got rid of the heavy database and the elaborate caching setup. Now it's just a static file server. If it was just the blog it would be even easier to host. The website is more reliable and requires virtually no maintenance.
The best part for me is that I can work offline. It's just me and my text editor, so even my tiny Macbook 12" feels blazing fast.
Version control is also incredibly valuable. I can review my changes or roll them back. I can also find/replace across the entire content with regex. Text files are easy to work with.
I wrote about how it feels and why it works here: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/ursus
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#4I’m skeptical cheap and easy is something inherent with static sites. I think a dynamic setup can have both those qualities, but there isn’t yet CMS/blog software that hits the sweet spot: self-contained, simple to setup, manage, and host.
Hugo users would disagree with you.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#5As an "outsider" who dabbles in wasm I never understood why running custom code on the server to generate "dynamic" webpages would be better then a dumb server which just serves files, and the dynamic part is running in the browser instead (other then that 90's web browsers sucked for this type of stuff).
E.g. nothing will ever beat a dumb file server with a cdn in front when it comes to simplicity and scalability.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#6I’m skeptical cheap and easy is something inherent with static sites. I think a dynamic setup can have both those qualities, but there isn’t yet CMS/blog software that hits the sweet spot: self-contained, simple to setup, manage, and host.
Write your own. You know what subset of features you care about, only implement what you need how you need it, and don't worry about making it extensible for others. You'll never need to read any documentation or worry about breaking changes when you update it, and you'll know exactly what it is doing.
I wrote my blog's static site generator 10 years ago and I'm still using it. If I want something it doesn't do, I change it. It's still a single-file perl script and it's easier (for me) than any other option.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#7I’m skeptical cheap and easy is something inherent with static sites. I think a dynamic setup can have both those qualities, but there isn’t yet CMS/blog software that hits the sweet spot: self-contained, simple to setup, manage, and host.
Indeed. These days we have 24x7 net connections on both our mobiles as well as home LAN/desktop whatever, but you still can't get a single, 1-click, drop-dead simple program that you can use to both author as well as serve web-pages and images right from your own device. Thanks largely to dynamic IPs, NAT, firewalls, ISP upstream throttling and developer apathy (since their livelihood may depend on the complexity of this), Joe wanting to publish his thoughts or photos still either has to sell his soul to FB/Insta/whatever or fork over significant cash for the likes of Wordpress/Squarespace, OR spend days to teach himself the nitty-gritty of buying a domain, fiddling with your DNS, setting up dynDNS, connecting all this to GitHub pages or whatever, fronting the whole thing with Cloudflare.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#8I’m skeptical cheap and easy is something inherent with static sites. I think a dynamic setup can have both those qualities, but there isn’t yet CMS/blog software that hits the sweet spot: self-contained, simple to setup, manage, and host.
Indeed. These days we have 24x7 net connections on both our mobiles as well as home LAN/desktop whatever, but you still can't get a single, 1-click, drop-dead simple program that you can use to both author as well as serve web-pages and images right from your own device. Thanks largely to dynamic IPs, NAT, firewalls, ISP upstream throttling and developer apathy (since their livelihood may depend on the complexity of…
Freenet has been doing this since the 00s.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#9As an "outsider" who dabbles in wasm I never understood why running custom code on the server to generate "dynamic" webpages would be better then a dumb server which just serves files, and the dynamic part is running in the browser instead (other then that 90's web browsers sucked for this type of stuff). E.g. nothing will ever beat a dumb file server with a cdn in front when it comes to simplicity and scalability.
Because you can't guard your competitive advantage as easily when you need to send your entire codebase to the client, and it turns out companies like that stuff.
Re: The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
#10I run a content website for a living. This year I switched from Craft CMS to my own static site generator. I no longer think about the server or the CMS. I no longer need to keep it updated. I got rid of the heavy database and the elaborate caching setup. Now it's just a static file server. If it was just the blog it would be even easier to host. The website is more reliable and requires virtually no maintenance. The…
Wow, that website loads so fast.