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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#191

Post by foxylad »

montefischer wrote: post #166
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…

Do you have links to the text only news sites?

CNN is on https://lite.cnn.com/. The home page is a single 30KB HTML file (my browser also insists on downloading their 6KB favicon).

A thing of beauty, compared to their normal home page with 90+ files of 12MB.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#192

Post by foresto »

makeitdouble wrote: post #151
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 sep…

More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor:

Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields and re-submit the form. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com. Please waste your time repeatedly solving annoying puzzles, until our CAPTCHA provider can sufficiently fingerprint you and your browser. Please re-type the text you already entered, because we reset some or all of the form fields due to one of the above complaints.

No thanks. If I'm at a contact page, it is most likely because I have something of value to the site owner, such as potential business or knowledge of something broken on their site. If they expect me to jump through hoops, I won't bother.

In principle, contact forms could be nice enough, just as many web sites could be clear, simple, quick-loading, static pages. In practice, they're generally a burden.

Given that they don't offer much to the visitor even in the best case, I would rather just see an email address.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#193

Post by Eliah_Lakhin »

The current state of web development engineering is largely the result of how startup economics have functioned over the past decade.

A startup's market value is often closely tied to its number of employees. From an investor's perspective, a company with 1,000 employees is typically valued much higher than a small team of 37 programmers — regardless of the revenue generated per employee, or even if the company isn’t generating revenue at all. This is largely because interest rates remained very low for a long time, making it reasonable to borrow investment funds for promising companies with large staffs.

However, those employees need to be kept busy with something that appears useful, at least in theory. I believe this is one of the primary reasons we see such complex solutions for relatively simple tasks, which sometimes might not require a large team of advanced web developers or sophisticated technologies at all.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#194

Post by wruza »

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…

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.

Almost everyone does that since I’m here and that is at least for 10 years. We even have a thread about it from time to time. HN is absolutely fine and didn’t change that much cause it disincentivizes attention seeking, at least cheap one. They may slip in from time to time but mostly get a cold shower from users and mods. Also this forum is much more tricky than it seems, from a technical standpoint.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#195

Post by cheschire »

montefischer wrote: post #166
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…

Do you have links to the text only news sites?

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#196

Post by makeitdouble »

foresto wrote: post #192
makeitdouble wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sep…

More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor: Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields an…

Yes! It's a plague that's hurting most generic content submissions services.

Most Saas in that area can't see the difference between a freelance portfolio site where you can send work offers and the support form of your local telecom where people will send death threats.

At the end of the day, for the lambda user it's just better to have the forms handled on the same platform as the site (wix, squarespace etc.) than dealing with a generic solution elsewhere.

> email address

On the receiving end, the advantage of the contact form is to map it to something else that email (Google Sheets etc.). Of course you can set an automated email box that will process the incoming mail into something else, but that's just an additional burden.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#197

Post by Karrot_Kream »

wruza wrote: post #194
jjmarr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Almost everyone does that since I’m here and that is at least for 10 years. We even have a thread about it from time to time. HN is absolutely fine and didn’t change that much cause it disincentivizes attention seeking, at least cheap one. They may slip in from time to…

Yes but that's okay at a smaller scale where all the users are more aligned and there's less karma to get. HN now is big enough that gaming the karma system by commenting quickly with rage or nostalgia bait is a winning strategy and for most general appeal topics on the site these days that's exactly what happens.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#198

Post by JonathonW »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #162
JellyBeanThief wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't the whole idea of a web browser kind of contrary to the ideals of the web? It implicitly divides people into speakers and listeners. In a parallel universe, web browsers are called webitors, and they can edit websites as well as view them. People can suggest changes. People can publish annotations. Web hosting is like email--pick (or build) any service you like and pick (or build) any client you like. T…

Back in the day mozilla (the browser, before the mozilla org made firefox) edited html in a wysiwyg fashion. All my early websites were made with it. I never did work out how to remove a

SeaMonkey (the direct successor to Netscape Communicator and the pre-Firefox Mozilla Suite) still does.

Doesn't produce particularly modern HTML, but if you want to author HTML like it's 1999, it's out there.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#199

Post by ukuina »

yaky wrote: post #174
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…

Not as catastrophic, but during power outages in my neighborhood, I am usually left with a poor cell signal (no backups on cable internet boxes). Electric utility's outage map is hidden behind a login (!) and is rendered with fancy clustering and other UI features that are already slow even with a decent connection. So it takes quite a while to check the status or even report an outage. I could call the utlity compan…

> they chose voice navigation (instead of keypad tones) for their menu

Most voice menus have hidden, 1-indexed touchtone mappings.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#200

Post by nnf »

yaky wrote: post #174
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…

Not as catastrophic, but during power outages in my neighborhood, I am usually left with a poor cell signal (no backups on cable internet boxes). Electric utility's outage map is hidden behind a login (!) and is rendered with fancy clustering and other UI features that are already slow even with a decent connection. So it takes quite a while to check the status or even report an outage. I could call the utlity compan…

The electric utility in my area is this bad and worse. I once reported a power outage when the power wasn’t actually out (explanation follows) and they had no way for me to cancel the report when I realized everything was fine. I tried calling but couldn’t get past an automated “we received your report and are working on it” message.

(Why would I report an outage when the power wasn’t out? Our lights blipped and my whole-home battery backup system kicked into action and showed a “grid outage” message. I checked it a few minutes later and it still showed the same status, so wanting to be a helpful neighbor, I reported it. I found out later that the battery backup system stays off-grid for five minutes following an outage of any length, even just a blip, I think as a debounce protection. When the utility trucks showed up, I told them what had happened and that their system wouldn’t let me cancel the report, but they were just glad to have a break from running around dealing with outages nearby, so they stayed and talked for a few minutes, curious about the battery system. Nice guys.)

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