181–190 of 253 posts
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The AI only changes things when I want it to, and to my command. It's very stable.
You could also upgrade a static generator when you want to and equally achieve stability.
I made the jump to Hugo too (from a managed service: svbtle) a long time ago, but I'll be really honest... I regret it. I decided to use an off-the-shelf theme, but it didn't quite meet the needs and I forked it; as it so happens Hugo breaks userland relatively often and a complex theme like the one I have requires a lot of maintenance. Like.. a lot . Now I can't really justify the time investment of fixing it so I j…
No need for the entire binary.
Just put `go run github.com/gohugoio/hugo@vX.Y.Z "$@"` into a `hugo.sh` script or similar that's in source control, and then run that script instead of the Hugo binary.
You'll need Go installed, but it's incredibly backwards compatible, so updating to newer Go versions is very unlikely to break running the old Hugo version.
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I'm already self hosting my own cookieless analytics, and before, I hosted Drupal (LEMP stack) and Apache Solr on separate servers. I'm used to self-hosting, and any comment solution I use will be self-hosted as well (see: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167 ) The code surface with SSG + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is much, much smaller than it ever was running Drupal or another CMS.
Yes, SSG pipeline + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is way simpler than Drupal. But all you've done in bought on all the pain and compromise of having to think from an SSG perspective, and that created problems which you've already identified you'll figure out in future I'm suggesting 2 or 3 small self-hosted OSS tools, where one is a small hand crafted server that basically takes a markdown file, renders it, and…
For me, an unstated reason for SSG is being able to scale to millions of requests per hour without scaling up my server to match.
Serving static HTML is insanely easy, even on a cheap $5-10/month VPS. Serving anything dynamic at all is an order of magnitude harder.
Though... I've been using Cloudflare since 2022, after I started getting regular targeted DDoSes (was fun initially, seeing someone target different parts of Drupal, until I just locked down everything except for the final comment pages). The site will randomly get 1-2 million requests in a few minutes, and now Cloudflare eats those quickly, instead of my VPS getting locked up.
Ideally, I'll be able to host without Cloudflare in front at some point, but every month, because of one or two attacks, the site's using 25-35 TB of bandwidth (at least according to CF).
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Nice! So you weren't forced to rewrite a comments solution when you shifted to an SSG, you just coincidentally had to do them at the same time? It looks like you did exactly what Jeff did: got fed up with big excessive server sides and went the opposite way and deployed and wrote your own minimal server side solutions instead. There's nothing wrong with that, but what problem were you solving with the SSG part of tha…
> [...] what problem were you solving with the SSG part of that solution? Why would you choose to pregenerate a bunch of stuff which might never get used any time anyone comments or updates your website, when you have the compute and processes to generate HTML from markdown and comments on demand? I was not trying to solve a specific problem. This is a hobby project and my choices were driven mostly by personal prefe…
This, definitely.
I think until you experience your first few DDoSes, you don't think about the kind of gains you get from going completely static (or heavily caching, sometimes at the expense of site functionality).
Where did the family crest go?
Or I might stick it somewhere else, as an easter egg, we'll see!
I made the jump to Hugo too (from a managed service: svbtle) a long time ago, but I'll be really honest... I regret it. I decided to use an off-the-shelf theme, but it didn't quite meet the needs and I forked it; as it so happens Hugo breaks userland relatively often and a complex theme like the one I have requires a lot of maintenance. Like.. a lot . Now I can't really justify the time investment of fixing it so I j…
My needs for a site are pretty simple, so I might just go with the custom-built one to be honest.
If it breaks, I can just go look in the mirror for the culprit =)
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What do you mean? The list has more open source options than not. You can self-host those. It’s going to be easier to self-host a drop-in comment system than an entire dynamic site plus/including comment system.
If you want interactivity, we agree, you have to either run a server, or you have to use a 3rd party. It's easier for a server to render markdown than it is for an SSG site to do server stuff. Your suggestion for comments is to run a server/use a third party, and do SSG. My suggestion is to just run a server. One is clearly easier as it has fewer steps. The idea that you can run a decent personal website without comp…
With the SSG you’re just managing your static markdown for your site’s content, then you’re dropping in a tiny extra piece for comments.
The comment self-hosting is a simple docker container with minimal configuration, an out of the box just works type of service.
Building a personal website that is hosted along with the interactivity integrated is more like managing an entire application, which is exactly what Jeff described with his pain using Drupal. He didn’t actually need all the interactivity that a full blown hosted site offers.
For example, if I run a PHP, Django, or NodeJS based website, now I’ve got to periodically update my whole site’s codebase to keep up with supported/safe versions of PHP, Python, or Node/npm packages.
With the SSG plus comment system you’re pretty much just pulling latest docker image for the comment system and everything else is just static.
I think you’d also have to agree that outsourcing comments to a 3rd party service is potentially a simpler/cheaper exercise than outsourcing the entire site. I see that some of the Hugo supported commenting systems seem to have a free tier with no ads that should support Jeff’s traffic.
Another interactive example is Netlify’s forms system, which is included in their free product.
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How do you handle comments in a "static blog"?
On mine, I don't. Any interactivity is too much hassle for me to worry about wrt moderation etc. I also don't particularly care what random people have to say. If my friends like what I wrote, they can tell me on Signal or comment on the Bluesky post when I share the link.
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I'm already self hosting my own cookieless analytics, and before, I hosted Drupal (LEMP stack) and Apache Solr on separate servers. I'm used to self-hosting, and any comment solution I use will be self-hosted as well (see: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167 ) The code surface with SSG + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is much, much smaller than it ever was running Drupal or another CMS.
But how in the world will you shove a decent search into a static site? I really want to know because there is a Drupal 7 site that I need to migrate to something but I need good search on it (I’m using solr now). Edit: I should have specified that I need more functionality than just word searching. I need filtering (ie faceted search) too. I’ve used a SSG that uses a JavaScript index and appreciate it, but that’s no…
You may be interested in Backdrop, which is a maintained fork of Drupal 7.
(No experience with it personally. Only know about it from a friend who uses it.)