Django-medusa: Rendering Django sites as static HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: Django-medusa: Rendering Django sites as static HTML

#21

Post by mtigas » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:05 AM UTC

ericingram wrote: post #19

mtigas wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an itch I wanted to scratch. I’d been tempted to convert my entire (Django-based) blog over to something like Hyde[1], but wanted a bit more flexibility than the framework provided. In most applications I work on, I lovingly use and abuse Memcached, Redis, and Varnish. If you’re working on an application that warrants using a live website and the whole application server shebang, then yes, I’d agree with you.…

I'm wondering, what kind of dynamic features were you interested in for a blog that you update once per month? Why not just edit static files on S3?

I'm actually coming up on ten years of having the same blog: waaaayyyyy back when I started, I was editing all my pages manually. (Though blog posts didn’t have permalinks, it was just a growing massive "list page" that I’d break off and paginate every so often.) It started to become a pain in situations where I wanted to modify some basic aspect of every page: I’ve consistently gotten the itch to either re-architect or re-design my blog annually.

You really can’t beat a system that uses templates.

I'd tried my own Javascript-based content system in the past (where everything is based on one HTML page and JS loads the page content), but those add a bit more client-side complexity (not to mention search engine reachability).

I think the ability to regenerate an entire 500+ page static HTML site is pretty powerful and useful. (Also: who wants to manually update date-based URL paths every time there’s a new thing? http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/06/30/ http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/06/ http://v3.mike.tig.as/blog/2012/ etc.)

EDIT: As to your first question wrt "dynamic features I wanted": CMS and full control over my site's behavior and templates. It’s Django-based, too, so I can theoretically extend it with any features as necessary. (I also have plenty of "non-published" content that I can view on the local, "hot type" development server of my site, but the "renderer" file is only configured to upload blog posts marked as "live". I find that feature pretty useful.)

Re: Django-medusa: Rendering Django sites as static HTML

#22

Post by Bockit » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 4:16 AM UTC

ashray wrote: post #14

Bockit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our last 2 clients have asked for static solutions because they don't have the capacity to maintain django apps down the line and don't want to hire new staff or continue paying us for maintenance. We ended up developing both sites in django, which made it easy for them to add copy during development and see how it would actually look on the site. Once finished, we got the HTML output and sent it over for them to put…

I see, that makes perfect sense! So it's an interesting thing for website development businesses. Especially the part where you allow the client to modify 'static' content. Well, in that case I can see how this tool could be really handy! Thanks for the input :)

I'm imagining a setup now where we host their staging environment as it would effectively just be disk space, and when they want to publish changes it could render using this and publish to wherever the static files are hosted (S3, their own service, provide them as a zipped download, etc.).

Re: Django-medusa: Rendering Django sites as static HTML

#23

Post by ashray » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:53 PM UTC

mtigas wrote: post #21

ericingram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering, what kind of dynamic features were you interested in for a blog that you update once per month? Why not just edit static files on S3?

I'm actually coming up on ten years of having the same blog: waaaayyyyy back when I started, I was editing all my pages manually. (Though blog posts didn’t have permalinks, it was just a growing massive "list page" that I’d break off and paginate every so often.) It started to become a pain in situations where I wanted to modify some basic aspect of every page: I’ve consistently gotten the itch to either re-architect…

I see how you can use this :) It's actually a pretty great idea for some scenarios so kudos on that!

TBH, I still think Django is overkill for a static site, there are templating systems and frameworks that would be far lighter (flask + jinja ?) - especially given that you really don't need any dynamic usage at all.

Still, great work on creating and releasing a tool that makes your (and possibly others..) life easier!