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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#141

Post by psd1 »

davidgerard wrote: post #126
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?

Perhaps Disqus? I believe it's opaque to the site owner - users auth to Disqus, you don't need a db.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#142

Post by simonw »

The fix for this is GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. That way you don't have to run any software yourself at all - the build process runs entirely on GitHub for you, and it's free as well.

I'm surprised I haven't come across more examples of people using GitHub Actions with static site generators like this. Ideally someone would share a GitHub repository template that comes pre-configured with a good static site generator which people could then use as a one-click starting point for their own sites.

I've considered building one of those myself but I tend not to use static site generators (I like Baked Data instead: https://simonwillison.net/2021/Jul/28/baked-data/) so I'm not a great person to take on that project.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#144

Post by spondylosaurus »

simonw wrote: post #142

The fix for this is GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages. That way you don't have to run any software yourself at all - the build process runs entirely on GitHub for you, and it's free as well. I'm surprised I haven't come across more examples of people using GitHub Actions with static site generators like this. Ideally someone would share a GitHub repository template that comes pre-configured with a good static site gene…

The GitHub Pages splash page (https://pages.github.com/) has a nice little interactive tutorial for just that, and I've seen plenty of repo templates for various SSGs/themes, but I think a lot of users still run into the following hurdles:

- Not knowing what GitHub is or how it works (let alone Git itself)

- Not knowing how to clone a repo

- Not knowing what program you need to modify the files in a repo, or how to use it

- Not knowing how to make/push commits

- Not knowing how to build local previews to see your changes before they take effect

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#145

Post by sphars »

davidgerard wrote: post #126
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?

There's several solutions for comments, as documented here: https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#146

Post by smitelli »

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…

Honestly, the last thing I want is to allow randos unfettered access to deface my personal site. Maybe it brings value to somebody somewhere, but my mental health got better when I finally turned them off for good.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#147

Post by dimal »

We’re dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G, and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k of jQuery blocking rendering. It’s great that people are doing this work, but citizens needed this a week and a half ago. By now, I’ve figured out where to get water, food, non potable water, etc. Seeing tech fail so badly through all this has been eye opening for me, in a depressing way.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#148

Post by tlavoie »

Kye wrote: post #131
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…

Disqus solved this for a while, but they did various things over the years to push people away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus#Criticism,_privacy,_and... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22disqus%22 Facebook offered a commenting system a lot of sites used, but it also lost trust and reach with its scandals.

There are similar-ish tools such as Isso. Self-hosted, no snooping, stored on SQLite. https://isso-comments.de/

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#149

Post by codethief »

> a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets "rehydrated" client-side.

Huh? Either the page gets rendered server-side and (possibly) hydrated client-side, or it gets rendered client-side (i.e. a classic SPA) but then there is no hydration.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#150

Post by jeffreyrogers »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #124
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.

The article is about how static sites are too complicated for normal people to set up, so people aren't getting those benefits for free because it's too hard for them to do.

Edit: The other thing is that non-technical users want a WYSIWYG editor. They don't want to edit markdown or html text files. So once you have all the infrastructure in place to support that it's not really any more complicated to make your customers' webpages dynamic as well.

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