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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#121

Post by treflop »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #85
graypegg wrote: post #68

In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web hosting provider. It worked great for them.…

I love when businesses do stuff like this. If it works, it works. My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but make their solution better and ensure my solution for them works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the success they already had with what they were doing already. A lot of developers don't want to admit this—in my experience at least—but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions a…

People forget to keep track of how long it takes them to do things.

I see people bifurcated into "people good at time estimates" and "people who think time estimates are always wrong." The former have been keeping track, improved continuously, and have become good. The latter have no clue.

Setting up a website from scratch is not hard, but it is time consuming, especially when you throw in maintenance.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#122

Post by Stoids »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #85
graypegg wrote: post #68

In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web hosting provider. It worked great for them.…

I love when businesses do stuff like this. If it works, it works. My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but make their solution better and ensure my solution for them works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the success they already had with what they were doing already. A lot of developers don't want to admit this—in my experience at least—but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions a…

I do consulting for a few restaurants, and despite my experience building full-stack web applications, I find myself reaching for Excel for most of my deliverables. These are "applications" that "non-technical" restaurant operators need to be comfortable in. Having a sheet where they paste in some data and get their needed output has required the least amount of continued maintenance and training. They can drag the file around in Dropbox / Google Drive and that works for them.

I still try to "engineer" to the best of my ability—separating raw input from derived data from configuration, data normalization, etc. With Lambda functions in Excel now, I kinda just pretend I'm writing Lisp in an FRP editor / runtime environment. The ETL tools with PowerQuery are quite good for the scale that these restaurants operate at.

Hard for me to turn off my brain in my full-time job when I am tasked with poorly recreating a feature that Excel nailed years ago.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#123

Post by marcosdumay »

graycat wrote: post #116
marcosdumay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is a social network application, not a blog.

Wouldn't a blog be generally simpler and, thus, generally comparatively a better candidate for a "static" site than "a social network application"? The Hacker News pages are "static" -- correct? For my startup's Web site, I wrote the code in ASP.NET and made the site "static" before I heard about "static": So, "static" is okay with me for what I did write. When I finally (whew!!) go live, I hope the candidate users w…

> The Hacker News pages are "static" -- correct?

No. They are inherently dynamic. They are generated by user-submitted content at real time.

On the article's categorization, it would make HN a complex site. But the categorization does not apply here.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#124

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #113

If you cache the rendered content then almost all of the advantages of a static site go away, particularly if you are a platform and can amortize the infrastructure cost over all your users.

You say all of the advantages go away, but I read, “if you put in extra work you can achieve some of what static sites get for free”.

Which is kind of funny as the main advantage of static sites is fewer things to worry about.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#125

Post by ohpls »

wvenable wrote: post #110

I fit into that Paradox -- I rewrote my own personal website in modern PHP without a framework or database. It's mostly a static site but uses PHP to add headers, deal with lists (for blog posts), etc. I found it slightly more convenient to be not completely static. I can just write up an article, commit, push, and it's online. I found most static site generators to be far too complicated. The code for a single page…

I've just started doing the same for one of my websites, 90% html but php for headers and include() for a few odd global bits.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#126

Post by davidgerard »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #87

The killer app of WordPress is comments. No SSG, almost by definition, allows comments; WordPress blogs almost always come with them built in. If you want something like Hugo to really take off in the blogging sphere, all you need to do is create some good looking themes with comments . Figure that out at scale - maybe by using per-blog sharded SQLite, which you can host as a third party for pennies on the dollar - a…

I'm looking at going static and this is literally the problem I have. Is there any out-of-the-box way (e.g. something in Javascript) to bolt comments onto a static site?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#127

Post by dizhn »

echoangle wrote: post #106
dhotson wrote: post #14

Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time. Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times. It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app. Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of…

How are you handling commonality between pages with plain html pages? As long as you don’t use iframes, you have to manually sync everything that’s shared or almost the same on alle pages (header, footer, navigation). That’s pretty annoying.

Pretty sure parent didn't actually mean plain html files for everything but if they did then perhaps they're using server side includes.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#128

Post by Vegenoid »

dhotson wrote: post #14

Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time. Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times. It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app. Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of…

Amusing how underneath this comment, there are several comments saying "ah, you just haven't found the right SSG, this one is good". Well-intentioned, but completely missing the point.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#129

Post by stared »

derekzhouzhen wrote: post #112
BeetleB wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author thinks that value come from realized utility. For the majority of the world, Wordpress indeed does provide more utility than an SSG. Wordpress is famous for their 5 minute installs, and then everything just works .

_realized_ utility. Also, the article is about fully managed Wordpress vs self-hosted (or PaaS hosted) SSG. If the choice is between self-hosted Wordpress vs self-hosted SSG, I bet the outcome will be very different. Now, you may wonder why the OP was not make an apple to apple comparison, like fully managed Wordpress vs fully managed SSG. Well, fully managed SSG does not exists, because it won't sell!

It seems that people pay for Ghost, https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#130

Post by TZubiri »

Phenomenon acknowledged but

"normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make them pay "

Here we go again, software needs to be free as in beer and anyone that charges for software is the devil

"software engineers enjoy free hosting & custom domain support with GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages "

You get what you pay for buddy.

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