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Static Site Generators

staticsitegenerators.net

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Re: Static Site Generators

#101

Post by programminggeek »

joshcrews wrote: post #97

I'm a Ruby developer and interested in creating a business in this space. Specifically a online-CMS that generates static html uploaded to a CDN. The target market is businesses who need to know their content is "uncrashable" and "infinitely scalable". The price point would be >$100/mo. Get in touch with me if you are interested in that idea.

I have a similar idea and your pricing is on track. Most people seem to price according to cost and think they're clever charing $9/mo. for hosting.

The technical side is not particularly difficult aside from dealing syncing and maybe failover. What is trickier is probably the CMS side because building a CMS is like the definition of feature creep. Eventually people want/get every feature under the sun, even if that doesn't really scale.

You probably have an interesting business there, but managing customer expectations and finding the happy balance in terms of investment is tricky.

Also, the customer acquisition side of the business is somewhat tough, but worth solving.

Good luck!

Re: Static Site Generators

#102

Post by pdwetz »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #81
hpaavola wrote: post #19

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page cont…

Usually that can be achieved with a cache like Varnish. One of the biggest benefits of static site generators is that the only software you need on your server is a web server. As soon as you want to start adding things like search and comments, you lose that benefit.

You can use third party tools for both search (e.g. google site search) and comments (e.g. discus). Of course, if you want to customize things further with user-supplied content, at some point you'll need a dynamic backend.

Re: Static Site Generators

#103

Post by look_lookatme »

hpaavola wrote: post #19

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page cont…

Nanoc can do this!

http://nanoc.ws/docs/extending-nanoc/#writing-data-sources

Re: Static Site Generators

#104

Post by pessimizer »

davexunit wrote: post #78

I've been using Pelican as my static site generator of choice, but I'm frustrated that Markdown and ReStructured Text are the only formats it can handle. I chose ReStructured Text over Markdown, but what I really want is to write org files. I've been meaning to roll my own solution in Emacs Lisp using org-publish plus some custom functions to generate RSS feeds, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

IIRC Pelican also works w/asciidoc.

Re: Static Site Generators

#106

Post by drzaiusapelord »

hpaavola wrote: post #19

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page cont…

Caching has killed the need for SSG's for the most part. You can cache Drupal or Wordpress or pretty much anything with either plugins/modules or via a proxy like Varnish. These things work, generally, by copying the dynamic page and serving up a static page until they detect the page has changed or the user is requesting dynamic functionality (trying to post a comment, log in, etc).

So you get the best of both worlds.

Re: Static Site Generators

#107

Post by xrd »

If you are interested in a site which creates a Jekyll blog, and installs it on GitHub for you, and has an Android app that acts as the correlate to the Wordpress app (and is open source) then check out http://teddyhyde.com. http://blog.teddyhyde.com documents how to modify the Android app if you want to help hack it.

Re: Static Site Generators

#108

Post by ermintrude »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #106
hpaavola wrote: post #19

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page cont…

Caching has killed the need for SSG's for the most part. You can cache Drupal or Wordpress or pretty much anything with either plugins/modules or via a proxy like Varnish. These things work, generally, by copying the dynamic page and serving up a static page until they detect the page has changed or the user is requesting dynamic functionality (trying to post a comment, log in, etc). So you get the best of both world…

Unless you want to host a site for peanuts on S3...

Re: Static Site Generators

#109

Post by jessaustin »

snide wrote: post #21
slacka wrote: post #20

My 60 yr old mother runs 2 small nonprofits, and is responsible for the web content and design. She's a pro with Word Perfect, but gets confused by simple HTML tags, and no interest, time, or aptitude to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Last weekend, she asked for help with her website, and I was shocked to find out they still look like they're out of the late 90's. She does all of her editing with a 2006 copy of dreamweav…

You might like webhook.com. We're launching in about a month. Basically, we're a static site generator with a CMS. You don't even use YAML or front-matter. Just build your forms with a local GUI, then pass yoursite.com/cms/ over to your Mom so she can edit in a wysiwyg (or markdown...whatever). Design with normal css/html and Django style templating. I built it because I loved static site generators (some great tools…

Do you think "webhook" might be kind of a confusing name? That's already a thing, and a different thing at that. It sounds to me like a model of automobile called "Motorcycle".

Re: Static Site Generators

#110

Post by twic »

__david__ wrote: post #6

Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).

I wrote one when i was at school, probably 1997 or 1998, to help a friend build a fan site for the Longpigs [1]. I assumed it was long lost, but apparently he took it to university with him, and the web archive caught it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac...

I think all the content was in handwritten HTML, but the generator knew enough to be able to do the navigation links and sitemap and so on.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longpigs

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