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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

#131

Post by PuffinBlue »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #115
PuffinBlue wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spoke with Alan Bellows from 'Damn Interesting'[0] on Reddit after his site hit the front page via a TIL post and he revealed a little about the traffic load.[1] It was very interesting to see and was quite a lot of traffic for sure. Bear in mind that the screenshot he posted is for concurrent visitors too. [0] http://www.damninteresting.com/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct/til_a...

I had no expectation of encountering my own name in this context. If there is a German word to describe the thing my neurons just did, I'll bet it has a lot of umlauts.

Ha! Sorry! I know the feeling too, there's a guy who keeps a mighty big interest in a website I run and I stumbled on his catalogue of its/my goings on.

Hopefully this doesn't reach that level of awkward and your info was really cool to see in that Reddit thread.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#132

Post by kefka »

I do something I call Dyna-Static.

I can run a static page off an Apache (or any wwwserver) instance. Just chuck files in /var/www/ where you want them.

Now where it gets interesting is I use Node-red to generate the pages; content and all. I want headers? It's a variable. I want ads? It's another variable Google provides. I want chat? Easy ( I can do it with nodered or 3rd party). I can bridge that webchat with my or someone else's IRC room.

Now, I can script it so the pages are updated from nod-red server to webserver. They can easily sit on the same box, as node-red takes few resources.

And the kicker is that I could get that done in an hour or so. Check out Node-Red . It really is that amazing.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#133

Post by dopamean »

jedberg wrote: post #108

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…

This is a neat story. I'd love to hear more stuff like this from other well known companies. Stories of ideas that never got off the ground but could have worked.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#134

Post by pan69 »

jedberg wrote: post #108

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…

How is what you're saying different from "normal" caching?

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#135

Post by JD557 »

jedberg wrote: post #108

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…

I might be wrong, but I believe that 4chan does something similar to this: Every time a post is made, the board is updated and new static pages are generated. All the server does then is serve this static pages.

(I can't find any official reference to this though, but another user has referenced this some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060200)

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#136

Post by stevekemp »

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…

I wrote something that works like that, called templer:

https://github.com/skx/templer

In the past I wrote all my HTML pages by hand. Then I started just writing the "body"-area, and concatenating a header, footer, and the body together to generate output. After that I started to make more changes.

In the end it grew, as these things do, but at the core templer allows you to put "stuff" into a "layout", and generates the output. It might suit you, or it might not. But there are many similar tools out there.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#138

Post by krschultz »

pan69 wrote: post #134
jedberg wrote: post #108

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…

How is what you're saying different from "normal" caching?

The question is whether you pre-warm the cache or cache a response after it goes through. If every single response is personalized, caching doesn't buy you a huge amount because the first request will be a cache miss, and the user may never call back a 2nd time. If you prewarm every single possible personalized result then there is almost always going to be a cache hit, which in effect is the same thing.

I guess theres also a question of whether you are caching data from the backend that powers a front end app, or actually caching the full front end itself.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#139

Post by z3t4 »

I agree with the article and think static web sites is the way to go if the read/write ratio is high, and where the view is not unique to the user.

However, quote > "The static version is more than six times as fast on average!"

This must be an engineering problem, especially on easily cached content. Serving static web sites Does require computation. But the current tools are very well made and optimized for it, witch is not the case with most CMS systems.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#140

Post by DamnInteresting »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #131
DamnInteresting wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no expectation of encountering my own name in this context. If there is a German word to describe the thing my neurons just did, I'll bet it has a lot of umlauts.

Ha! Sorry! I know the feeling too, there's a guy who keeps a mighty big interest in a website I run and I stumbled on his catalogue of its/my goings on. Hopefully this doesn't reach that level of awkward and your info was really cool to see in that Reddit thread.

No apologies necessary and no awkwardness implied--it was merely a surprise. A bit like being far from home and hearing someone shout my name.
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