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Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#101

Post by ryan-c »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
thenomad wrote: post #2

I've been a fan of static websites for a long while now. In addition to page load issues, they also more or less completely solve the Slashdot effect (aka the Reddit Hug Of Death, these days). A competently-configured Nginx server on a 512mb VPS, serving static-only content, will handle ridiculous amounts of traffic without flinching. Ever since a front-page mention on BoingBoing took down my feature film BloodSpell'…

Do you - or anyone - have stats about the possible traffic demands of Slashdot/Reddit/HN front page stardom? I'm very much in the Nginx/static camp, but it would be useful to know how bad the spikes can get.

I got around 50k hits to my "stupid cert tricks"[0] page from a combination of twitter, reddit and hackernews over a period of 48 hours. My site is static content generated with pelican[1], served by nginx and hosted on a $10/mo VPS. The page has one image, one stylesheet and a favicon. Peak rate was around 1.5 views per second (loads of the actual page - this does not include requests for assets). CPU usage was negligible, I'm sure it could have handled at least 25x that no problem.

0. https://rya.nc/cert-tricks.html

1. http://blog.getpelican.com/

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#103

Post by codingdave »

notacoward wrote: post #17
ak39 wrote: post #6

Ok, "static" here means no RDBMS-backed website. But you can still use statically generated JSON resources from a db once off. These resources can then be "filtered" and "combined" without the need for databases (not using the words JOIN or WHERE carefully). Sounds like a great idea to overcome the need to obsess about connection multi-plexing.

"Statically generated JSON resources" implies client-side rendering, and I suspect you'd find some disagreement over whether that's really static. If there's only one such resource per page, then maybe, though you'd still be losing some advantages wrt caching. If the JS running on the client has to fetch many such resources and stitch them together, then it's functionally equivalent to a standard dynamic website and…

How do you figure that loading a static file is the same as a DB query? Even if the actual finding of the bits on the hard drive and sending them across the wire is close to the same, you don't need a database running. You get to shut down an entire process, or depending on your architecture, an entire server.

Heck, once CDNs and caching get involved, I wonder how many requests will even hit your HTTP process at all.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#104

Post by codingdave »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #16

You know what I've always wanted, but my searches have led me to believe that it (inexplicably) doesn't exist? I want a simple site generator. I don't want markdown, I don't want a fancy templating engine. I want some simple templating system that takes in normal HTML and generates pages from simple templates I define. I want to shove in some arbitrary HTML and have it spit out a site using some base templates. To th…

Dreamweaver?

People can hate on it all day, but that is exactly what it does. There is a reason it was such a huge tool 15 years ago.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#105

Post by thecodemonkey »

ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

We're very close to launching a product that serves this exact purpose. [1]

Our primary motivation was being able to build a static website as easy as using WordPress - so we figured, why not turn WordPress into a static site generator?

As notacoward mentioned, there is a few gotchas so we decided to launch it as a SaaS in order to abstract those things away and make it fully hosted on a CDN out of the box. We still give you full access to the WP install though, so no vendor-lock in or shackles for the customer.

Happy to give anyone a demo if you're interested. You can contact me at mathias AT dotsqua.re

[1] http://spudpress.com

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#108

Post by jedberg »

When I was heading up reliability at Netflix, we considered, and even began evaluating, turing the whole thing into one big static site. Each user had a custom listing, but generating 60+ million static sites is a very parallelizeable problem.

At the time, the recommendations only updated once a day, but an active user would have to dynamically load that content repeatedly, and at the same time, the recs were getting updated for users who hadn't visited that day. By switching to static, we could generate a new static site for you every time you watched something (which could change your recommendations), and increase reliability at the same time, so it would have been a much better customer experience. Unfortunately we couldn't get enough of the frontend engineers to buy into the idea to get it off the ground, and also they were already well along the path to having a data pipeline fast enough to update recs in real time.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#109

Post by devbug »

bigethan wrote: post #37

The thing that always pulls me back to wordpress is the ease of creation and hosting. Drag an image into your text, and pop it's uploaded, hosted, and linked to. Write something in the interface and bam it's online and reliable. Every static site generator I've played with (And there have been TONS), solves 80% of the problem. I'd love an app that gave me that ease of hosting and creation and generated a static site…

Have you tried Webhook?

http://www.webhook.com/

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