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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#151

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

Another "interactive" part: contact forms.

Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an alternative, but handling the input pipeline is better.

On a static site that requires finding a service they trust to handle the submission and correctly plug it in their site. It becomes another moving part, potentially another bill that needs to be paid separately, another bit to deal with when the industry consolidates etc.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#152

Post by meiraleal »

codethief wrote: post #149

> 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.

the "hydrated" means that external objects (JSON) are added to the running SPA.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#153

Post by FalconSensei »

This is what drove me away from static sites. It's actually more work because you have to be the one to do all the stuff.

Sure, there are a few options for hosting and generating the build, but when I tried, they were not that good, or had some issues, etc... Meanwhile, wordpress.com never disappointed, and has an app for iOS and Android that you can use to update stuff whenever you are - as long as you have internet, of course.

That's why nowadays I use Obsidian Publish. Of course, I could use Quartz or some other alternative for building a site from my obsidian vault but... none will just work out of the box, from your phone

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#154

Post by dangerlibrary »

jjmarr wrote: post #118
corry wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was true during the age of the blog, but far less so now. Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs. will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same post? IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be higher quality for a tech-related…

The more people join a social media site the worse the conversation gets. This is already happening to HN as tech people flee Reddit. Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph. This is an evolutionary process where the commenters that get the most engagement are those that are first to respond or react. First-mo…

Like our ancestors before us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#155

Post by sandeep_random »

lqet wrote: post #12

> If you didn't know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it's actually the inverse: only few professional software engineers can "afford" to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions. I am confused, the inverse would be that professional engineers have [2…

Somewhere down the line the ease of publishing changes is the differentiating factor which should have been accounted in the comparison

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#156

Post by FalconSensei »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #52
rwbt wrote: post #34

Static sites are great until you need to have a contact form or want to add basic comments. Yes, you can deploy javascript that uses external services to add such functionality to static sites- but with a basic WordPress site, you get everything right out of the box.

A contact form is a terrible alternative to an email address. Many sites have dropped comments altogether. Yes, these things might be nice-to-haves, but they shouldn't be the factor that determines whether you have a static site or a scripted one.

> Many sites have dropped comments altogether

And many still have. I think most wordpress.com and blogger blogs have comments on

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#157

Post by dingnuts »

dimal wrote: post #147

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 o…

that situation has had me thinking about getting an amateur radio license again. In a disaster like what happened to Western NC, which encompasses a much greater area than just Asheville, I wouldn't want to rely on anything based on the Internet. You want something with a long wavelength and low power. But it's so inaccessible, and I'm not sure if it's for good reason or not.

Connectivity was knocked out from Black Mountain all the way to the Tennessee and Georgia borders. I'd be surprised if many people even have shitty 3G back yet. What I know is remaining in touch with people who live there has been hard.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#158

Post by dangerlibrary »

There is no such thing as perfect software. Everything comes with tradeoffs. Except, of course, for mkdocs.

I know other people like jekyll or hugo or whatever, but I've never seen anything comparable to the simplicity of mkdocs. It has built in search for the entire site, nice looking nav, everything is markdown.

The best part though? Here's my "build pipeline".

$ mkdocs build

$ scp -r ./build @dangerlibrary.com:/site

I love it.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#159

Post by dfex »

> ...the web used to be more interesting when more of it was made by people different from us

And there it is, beautifully distilled into one sentence.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#160

Post by jachee »

dingnuts wrote: post #157
dimal wrote: post #147

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 o…

that situation has had me thinking about getting an amateur radio license again. In a disaster like what happened to Western NC, which encompasses a much greater area than just Asheville, I wouldn't want to rely on anything based on the Internet. You want something with a long wavelength and low power. But it's so inaccessible, and I'm not sure if it's for good reason or not. Connectivity was knocked out from Black M…

CB is roughly 11m wavelength and doesn’t require a ton of power, and doesn’t require any licensing.
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