Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 253 posts

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#91

Post by _heimdall »

1dom wrote: post #52

I think this is silly, and it's a hill I'm willing to die on. I wrote this in a comment yesterday, and Jeff has fully confirmed/vindicated this in his post: SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server. If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamical…

This is where I've found Astro to really shine. Most people reached for it because of the whole "islands of interactivity" concept, but IMO the ability to easily build a mostly static site with server APIs when needed is a the killer feature.

I manage multiple Astro sites and eventually they have all needed at least a few small server endpoints. Doing that with Astro is very simple and it can be done without making the static portions of the site a pain to maintain.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#92

Post by ivanjermakov »

susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

Writing blog generator is not only fun but also grants ultimate control, such as static syntax highlighting, equation rendering and custom build steps. Highly recommend!

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#93

Post by jtbayly »

seanwilson wrote: post #79
jtbayly wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how in the world will you shove a decent search into a static site? I really want to know because there is a Drupal 7 site that I need to migrate to something but I need good search on it (I’m using solr now). Edit: I should have specified that I need more functionality than just word searching. I need filtering (ie faceted search) too. I’ve used a SSG that uses a JavaScript index and appreciate it, but that’s no…

See https://gohugo.io/tools/search/ . Not sure how well they scale to thousands of posts, but they work by statically generating multiple static search index files at build time that are queried via client JavaScript when hosted. The search UX is actually really good because they tend to respond instantly as you type your query and allow complex queries.

Do you happen to know if any of those support faceted search (ie searching and filtering by date, category, etc)?

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#94

Post by seanwilson »

jtbayly wrote: post #93
seanwilson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://gohugo.io/tools/search/ . Not sure how well they scale to thousands of posts, but they work by statically generating multiple static search index files at build time that are queried via client JavaScript when hosted. The search UX is actually really good because they tend to respond instantly as you type your query and allow complex queries.

Do you happen to know if any of those support faceted search (ie searching and filtering by date, category, etc)?

I've used https://lunrjs.com/guides/getting_started.html briefly and it has lots of options for things like different fields, complex queries, fuzzy searching and wildcards. Didn't notice anything specific about dates but you could always add date as a field then filter out a date range manually at the end. I'm sure there's better libraries now as well.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#95

Post by networked »

susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

I'm also happy with the freedom and stability of a single-purpose static site generator. My previous project, Tclssg, was public and reusable from the start. This had big upsides: I learned to work with users and was compelled to implement features I wouldn't have. I actually wrote documentation. Seeing others use it was one of the best parts of the work. However, it also put constraints on what I could do. I couldn't easily throw away or radically change features, like how templates are rendered by default. With an SSG that's only for my site, I can.

If I were maintaining multiple large sites or working with many collaborators, I'd rely on something standard or extract and publish my SSG. For a personal site, I believe custom is often better.

The current generator is around 900 SLOC of Python and 700 of Pandoc Lua. The biggest threats to stability have been my own rewrites and experimentation, like porting from Clojure to Python. I have documented its history on my site: https://dbohdan.com/about#technical-history.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#96

Post by 1dom »

senko wrote: post #60
1dom wrote: post #52

I think this is silly, and it's a hill I'm willing to die on. I wrote this in a comment yesterday, and Jeff has fully confirmed/vindicated this in his post: SSGs are good for static sites with no interactivity or feedback. If you want interactivity or feedback, someone (you or a 3rd party service provider) is going to have to run a server. If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamical…

> If you're running a server anyway, it seems trivial to serve content dynamically generated from markdown. Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money. The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, yo…

> Until you have enough visitors or evil AI bots scraping your site so that it crashes, or if you're using an auto-scaling provider, costs you real money.

There's been multiple blog posts on HN from people who've received a hug of death and handled it fine with basically free or A couple of gigs of RAM and 2 cores can take viral posts and the associated bots. 99% of personal websites never go viral either.

> The problem isn't in markdown→HTML conversion (which is pretty fast), it's that it's a first step in adding more bells and whistles, and before you know it, you're running a nextjs blog which requires server-side nodejs daemon so that your light/dark theme switch works as copy-pasted from stackoverflow.

This is my exact argument against SSGs, and Jeffs post proves it: it's easy to use SSG to generate web pages, but the moment you want comments, or any other bells and whistles, you do what Jeff's going to have to do and say you'll do it later because there's no obvious easy solution that doesn't work against and SSG.

> Why? Your interactive/feedback parts can be a 10-line script as well, running on the same site where you'd run Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Django, or whatever.

EXACTLY! This is my point! Why not just SSR the markdown on the server you're already running?!

This is the opposite of what Jeff and 99% of other SSG users do, they switch to SSGs to get rid of dealing with servers, only to realise they need servers or third parties, but then they're sunk-cost-fallacied into their SSG by the time they realise.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#97

Post by stevekemp »

zie1ony wrote: post #64
susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

Not the poster, but what I did was to have a CGI script which would receive incoming comments and write them to "/srv/data/blog/comments/XXX/TIMESTAMP.txt" or similar.

The next time I rebuilt the blogs the page "XXX" would render a loop of all the comments, ordered by timestamp, if anything were present.

The CGI would send a "thanks for your comment" reply to the submitter and an email to myself. If the comment were spam I'd just delete the static file.

Re: Jeffgeerling.com has been migrated to Hugo

#99

Post by xienze »

zie1ony wrote: post #64
susam wrote: post #34

A few years ago, I decided to migrate my personal website to a Common Lisp (CL) based static site generator that I wrote myself. In hindsight, it is one of the best decisions I have made for my website. It started out at around 850 lines of code and has gradually grown to roughly 1500 lines. It handles statically rendering blog posts, arbitrary pages, a guestbook, comment pages, tag listings, per tag RSS feeds, a con…

How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?

The way I’ve seen it done is that you render a script tag that embeds a third party comment system (like Disqus).
Post reply on HN