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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

#121

Post by scott_karana »

ionforce wrote: post #43
cryptos wrote: post #27

Most of the static site generators have serious usability problems. They are simply not usable for many users using WordPress today.

Usability problems like what?

> Usability problems like what?

Understanding of the command line, delayed WYSIWYG feedback loop, FTPing/synchronizing files. Some generators don't even tackle "pretty, easy to install templates a la Wordpress" either.

All surmountable, but I haven't seen an "all in one, easy to use" fix yet.

I'd love if I could recommend a single client-side app for people to use that did it all. Something like Coda but tailored for beginners?

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#122

Post by scott_karana »

devbug wrote: post #109
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/

Lest you close it after seeing the dollar sign like I did:

Keep reading, it's just the optional hosting that's paid, the software itself is open source.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#123

Post by grandalf »

vidarh wrote: post #72
grandalf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the first story I've heard that explains why Yahoo's navigation is so horrible and why your logged in state on your yahoo account doesn't follow you to different yahoo sites (business, mail, etc.)

That doesn't really explain it. Stuff that really needed to be dynamic would be. But we (I was at Yahoo 2003-2005) took privacy seriously and a lot of seeming quirks of login state etc. were well thought through and had good reasons. E.g. we were regularly reminded not to mingle data that identified browsers (that could "follow" an unlogged in user across sites) with data that identified users (as that would let us t…

Well, stuff like putting the "logged in yahoo account" indicator in the same place on each page, and indicating whether asking for a password was as a secondary verification (since already logged in) or if it was perhaps a different password.

Yes there were such horrible, glaring usability bugs it's quite amazing anyone had the patience to deal with it. I still cringe when I have to navigate anywhere on Yahoo at all, and actively avoid using anything associated with it.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#124

Post by CM30 »

It's an interesting idea, and I see the appeal if the site is fairly basic, but I think there's one thing people are forgetting here.

You're outsourcing half your site to third parties, and basically letting them do whatever the hell they like with it. Disqus comments? Better hope the people behind that system don't decide to outlaw comments about the thing your website is about. Javascript embedded shop system? Good, so long as you don't need to modify the look very much and don't mind all your data being hosted in a different part of the world (like, the US for people in other regions).

And if they decide that all your data needs to be shared with the NSA or some other government organisation, then tough luck. If they hacked... well, tough luck again.

Without hosting such systems yourself, you're relying on a lot of third parties to be transparent, honest and respectful of your privacy (and that of your visitors). It's basically like a return to the days of free hosting and services like Bravenet.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#125

Post by greghendershott »

davexunit wrote: post #58
greghendershott wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There's a spectrum of evaluation strategies from eager to lazy. Programs may mix various flavors. Lazy evaluation combined with memoization is a sexy and elegant approach to some problems, as are dynamic web sites. On the other hand, whenever possible to do so, it's hard to beat the speed and simplicity of handing over a precomputed answer like "42". A (very loose) analogy: Static generation of HTML is rough…

Funny that you mention Lisp. I am writing my own static site generator (because there are so few of them and everyone needs their own) in Scheme. http://haunt.dthompson.us

Cool. Mine's in Racket:

https://github.com/greghendershott/frog#frog

> (because there are so few of them and everyone needs their own)

A million monkeys.... :)

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#126

Post by MichaelGG »

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'…

But setting cache headers and letting nginx cache your site would also take care of load, right?

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#127

Post by davexunit »

greghendershott wrote: post #125
davexunit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that you mention Lisp. I am writing my own static site generator (because there are so few of them and everyone needs their own) in Scheme. http://haunt.dthompson.us

Cool. Mine's in Racket: https://github.com/greghendershott/frog#frog > (because there are so few of them and everyone needs their own) A million monkeys.... :)

Oh, didn't know you were the frog author. Awesome!

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#129

Post by notacoward »

ak39 wrote: post #116
notacoward wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loading the set of files needed to satisfy a request is equivalent to a database query. Databases and file systems have to deal with similar issues when looking up a single item, so there's a clear correspondence there. The difference is that a database can do a JOIN but a file system can't (directory traversals really aren't equivalent). In that case any such logic would have to be in the client-side JS, fetching ob…

The loading of static files for HTTP is significantly different from accessing the same data via databases. The biggest difference is the need for a CLI (call level interface) connection object in db access. And those things are resource hungry operations (authentication, prototocol management etc). Most times you have to pool connection objects which in itself is a resource cost. The DB is truly the scalability bott…

The overhead you're talking about doesn't seem to be in the database itself, but in crappy (possibly language- or framework-specific) interfaces to them. That's an application issue, and I was talking about system issues.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#130

Post by smacktoward »

ts330 wrote: post #7

I'm not entirely sure they're the next big thing. More likely, is that 15 years ago, it was people who were used to static sites began moving to dynamically generated ones as sites became more complex. They were the new thing then. Now we have a load of people who have grown up with dynamically generated sites and are suddenly discovering the benefits of static sites - thanks in part to the proliferation of tools tha…

15 years ago the hot new general purpose CMS was Movable Type (https://movabletype.org/) which was... a collection of Perl scripts that ground out static HTML pages. In other words, a static site generator.

Then everybody got tired of waiting for their sites to rebuild every time they changed something and switched to WordPress, which wasn't static. Suddenly your changes showed up right away! Hooray! Then everybody got tired of WordPress falling over under any load stronger than a stiff breeze, so suddenly static site generators were in fashion again.

If you think of approaches to building a content management system as a continuum, with purely static at one end and purely dynamic at the other, you can see the entire history of the segment as a series of oscillations along that continuum. Each approach has drawbacks, but the drawbacks of the approach you aren't using always seem minor while those of the approach you are using seem painful, so the market just bounces back and forth between them ad infinitum as people rush to discover if the grass on the other side of the fence is really as green as it looks.

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