Static Website Generators • Hacker News Board

Re: Static Website Generators

#191

Post by andreareina » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:50 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #3

eganist wrote: post #2

Yes! I was looking for a decent selection of single-page app SSGs for so long. This is only the second one I've found, the other being Lingon ( https://github.com/spotify/lingon ), and this one looks like the only one that can still work as a blog. Does anyone have any feedback or alternatives for SSGs which build static single-page blogs?

> single-page app SSGs How does that work? Isn't "single-page app" the exact opposite of a "static site"?

Found this[1] site some time ago demonstrating an SPA-style static site with no javascript. You end up having to download every article/page though.

[1]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/reimagining-single-...

Re: Static Website Generators

#192

Post by martin_a » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #166

martin_a wrote: post #163

"These days, speed and security is the name of the game." And it´s no problem to achieve both with WordPress. Maybe my mileage varies enormously from everybody else, but I am maintaining about 40 WordPress instances. We have tools to manage updates remotely, make fully automated daily backups, all sites are rated with 85 or more points on Google Page Speed Insights (YSlow and Pingdom Tools don´t rate bad either), we…

I don't disagree that wordpress is fine, but claiming it's easy to manage after saying you have a team to manage yours and have setup a load of software to handle its complexity for you is odd. And then you say "most people just can´t handle WordPress the right way", which is basically another way of saying "it's not easy". And 85 points on Google page speed insights or yslow are generally useless metrics. They give…

I am a one man army on that point, "we" is "our company", websites are not our main business. ;-)

The only software I use regularly is InfiniteWP to have a look for updates. Although it sends me a mail to my "status messages" slack channel, so no big deal on that end. Backups run automatically by BackWPUp Pro, caching and lock down are done when setting up/finishing a new site, so there´s not really much software involved at all.

85 points or A ratings or whatever alone are "just metrics" for sure. But I don´t think that I need to tell you that if you want to reach and keep a high value on those scales, you have to take care of compressed CSS and JS, auto-optimized images, caching, fast servers etc. pp.

Which in the end leads to fast(er), better accessible websites without dropping backend usability or features.

Re: Static Website Generators

#193

Post by narrowrail » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

lsaferite wrote: post #171

pietroalbini wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't https://www.getlektor.com what you're looking for?

I think the flat-file part is a breaker for my current needs unfortunately. But, being OSS I could perhaps fix that, so I'll add it to my short-list of possible solutions.

This very website we are on uses a flat-file structure (w/ millions of users). I'm curious why this is such a deal breaker for your current needs?

Re: Static Website Generators

#194

Post by andrewmunsell » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

andrewl wrote: post #144

andrewmunsell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also sort of a related, shameless plug-- I've been working on Formingo ( https://www.formingo.co ), a form processing service for static sites so you can receive your form submissions directly to your email without the need for server side code or your own backend. I've actually had a couple people ask me about comment systems that were an alternative to (and more simple than) Disqus, so it's cool to see someone work…

Formingo looks good. But one thing I'd like is the ability to hide my email address so it doesn't get picked up by spammers. The current setup shows the address plainly in the page source. Could the action field take some sort of identifier number or hash, as in: /submit/12345 Then your system looks up 12345 and sees it means john@example.com.

You can sign up (https://www.formingo.co/register) for a free account that lets you create forms that hide your email address (along with pre-verify your email address and domains so you don't have to click a verification link every time you add a form to a new URL/email address combo) :)

Re: Static Website Generators

#195

Post by mxuribe » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

I've tried pelican, lektor, hugo, and even a cobbled-together flask-based (using frozen pages module) custom static site builder. One of the biggest challenges/time sinks/annoyances of adopting any of these types of platforms is the time spent on the initial wiring up of the templates. Maybe I'm lazy in this regard, but I'd rather use a GUI/WYSIWYG interface to do the initial UX (not talking about design here, only placement of site objects/elements) for the site within the context of the relevant template. I don't mind spending a few minutes on setting up the build environment, setting up any dependencies, because its a local app that's being installed, so I get it that it requires a tiny investment in time. But setting up the templates, boy, that annoys me; especially for small sites which only have few pages and infrequent additions.

Case in point: I really wanted to use lektor; it's elegant persistent storage mechanism (no database required, basically text files organized within folders), and its brilliant idea for use of a local web GUI were what attracted me to it in the first place. But setup - for example - was annoying as hell on Windows (hey some of us can't afford to keep buying Macs!), and then of course after the install/setup comes the wiring of the templates (ugh). I can not imagine a conventional (non-dev.) user - who I would guess is a good candidate to extract great benefit from using a web GUI - won't have the patience or inclination to dive into code to wire up the templates. I don't mean to pick on lektor (I highly respect the team behind this!!), but it is an example of what most of these static site generators do: they mean to simplify things but 1 or 2 aspects of the system seem like quite a time sink.

Re: Static Website Generators

#196

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:10 PM UTC

lsaferite wrote: post #150

forlorn wrote: post #93

The main problem for me is that the absolute majority of them target blogs and if you try to adapt them for a more complicated website you gonna dive very deep inside the code or continue constant search. Now I look at hugo as it seems to be a more general-purpose tool that allows to play with structure and content types.

Personally, the biggest issues is the CMS backend part of the process. I'm fine writing content for an SSG, but the marketing department is not. What I really want is a fast, open, and simple CMS BE that has a publishing workflow where the output is a static site. I've yet to fine the perfect candidate. The ones that are close are SaaS platforms and that is unfortunately unacceptable. I'm perfectly ok paying for soft…

> "I'm perfectly ok paying for software, at least if I get the source."

Unusual position - source access is quite rare for commercial software, isn't it?

Re: Static Website Generators

#197

Post by danneu » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:12 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #189

forlorn wrote: post #93

The main problem for me is that the absolute majority of them target blogs and if you try to adapt them for a more complicated website you gonna dive very deep inside the code or continue constant search. Now I look at hugo as it seems to be a more general-purpose tool that allows to play with structure and content types.

Not wanting to dive deep inside the code but make a complicated website is like saying "I want to modify the engine of my car but I don't want to look under the hood a single time" Well, I guess that works if you have a VW Beetle ;)

Well, hopefully an SSG is saving you time compared to just writing a quick crawler that saves each route of your local Express app into a deployable static folder.

If you find yourself credentializing in the source of an SSG because it turns out you're doing something it doesn't support, then there's a point where it might've been faster to build as a dynamic site (more general tooling) with a static site build step.

It's an easy place to find yourself since so many SSGs generalize around blogging.

Re: Static Website Generators

#198

Post by hunvreus » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

lsaferite wrote: post #150

forlorn wrote: post #93

The main problem for me is that the absolute majority of them target blogs and if you try to adapt them for a more complicated website you gonna dive very deep inside the code or continue constant search. Now I look at hugo as it seems to be a more general-purpose tool that allows to play with structure and content types.

Personally, the biggest issues is the CMS backend part of the process. I'm fine writing content for an SSG, but the marketing department is not. What I really want is a fast, open, and simple CMS BE that has a publishing workflow where the output is a static site. I've yet to fine the perfect candidate. The ones that are close are SaaS platforms and that is unfortunately unacceptable. I'm perfectly ok paying for soft…

Funny you'd mention that. We're putting the final touches to an Open Source Jekyll CMS we've built for ourselves (called Jekyll+) that does just that; give a nicer interface for marketing folks and provide multilingual support out of the box.

Preview of my local copy we're prepping up for a release end of the week: http://i.imgur.com/1VyxGzqr.png

Happy to have you testing it out and give me feedback.

Re: Static Website Generators

#199

Post by chriswarbo » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

0xCMP wrote: post #149

chriswarbo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me that the performance of a static site generation is irrelevant, and thus time spent on this is really wasted effort. Another consideration is pages which take a long time to render. When I'm writing about code (which is a lot!) I use a literate programming style, so that code snippets on a page can be executed and have their output embedded in the HTML. This ensures that the code I'm discussing actua…

Do you have an example that shows this? I'm interested in bringing something like that into my own site.

I wrote it up at http://chriswarbo.net/projects/activecode

The process I use is very simple: shell commands are written as attributes of code blocks, and during rendering the content of the code blocks will be piped into those commands. Hence we can run a bash script by giving its code block a pipe="bash" attribute, python scripts by using pipe="python", haskell by using pipe="runhaskell", and so on for anything that can be called from a shell.

This is all powered by a couple of scripts based on Pandoc.

If you want to see some examples, click the "View Source" links at the bottom of my site. The pages I linked to above are quite complex, but some simpler examples are:

- The blog post listing comes from a `find` command http://chriswarbo.net/blog.html

- Images can be embedded using base64 URIs http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2015-06-06-more_git.html

- Code snippets can be checked, and we can even include real error messages http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2015-11-12-calculating_arity.html

Re: Static Website Generators

#200

Post by neya » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

Here's my experience: I previously used Middleman to build my blogshop and all was fine until I added more complexity. The codebase grew large and that's when I really hit the (Ruby) language's limits (too much type checking).

My intention is not to turn this into a language war, but I think using a good static site generator written a strongly typed language helps a lot. I considered Hugo, but eventually I decided to write my own in Scala and it has served me well.

A good static site generator should unleash a slew of goodies including code-reuse, viewing your website as a collection of functional components rather than just a bunch of partials. It's almost a full blown MVC project.

For example, my blogshop (not exactly 100% static) has 3 types of "Marketing" components - one of them is a widget asking for email subscriptions, the other is a popup for displaying offers, or email subscriptions based on the view it is used in, based on the parameters passed to it and finally the last one is a recommendation engine.

I don't trust Disqus nor Facebook especially after Facebook lost all my comments once (long ago, though). So, I host microservices for each of the components of my blogshop - One for recommendations, one for comments and so forth. They all live inside Appengine and I hardly hit the paid tier. The best part is that my blogshop can be written in any language I like and I can afford to write my other components in other languages. For example, I wrote my recommendation engine in Python, wrote my comments system in Scalatra. They all communicate with JSON APIs with each other.

For my authentication service, I use something called Apache Shiro. So, my static website is basically talking to each of my service through Ajax and injecting content using JS from the response from my microservices.

I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it really works well for me and is much better than using Wordpress which is something generic that is forced to fit into my workflow/business model.