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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#201

Post by sneak »

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…

An email address is the best contact form.

Anything else is overengineering.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#202

Post by whartung »

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…

> Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.

A specific capability oh HN, that I take advantage of often, is being able to skip thread branches. It’s not uncommon for me to go a few messages, think “Nah”, tap “root”, then “next”, and, boom, a 100 first impressions vanish in a click of disinterest.

It’s a really great feature and can act as a crude filter for first impressions.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#203

Post by otteromkram »

ukuina wrote: post #199
yaky wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only time I've had an issue with using the keypad is during the prompt that goes something like, "In a few words, tell me what you're calling about."

Hitting zero repeatedly at that point is usually the only way through.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#204

Post by j2kun »

The author mentions that WordPress charges for everything, but after migrating off WordPress to a static site, I've found most of the features WordPress bundles together are, in total, more expensive when paid for separately. WordPress.com is $300/yr for a business account, which includes domain, newsletters, unlimited bandwidth, etc. The cheapest provider of blog->email newsletter for > 1k subscribers is already as expensive, not to mention the domain, netlify plan (or overages on the free plan!), a hosted comments service.

I'm not complaining, but after a certain threshold, unbundling is much more expensive.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#205

Post by zelcon »

GH/CF Pages are only "free" if you have no/minimal traffic. Also, even that free tier will go away if you start popularizing it as a Wordpress alternative or make the barriers to entry lower. Let's keep it free, please

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#206

Post by pnt12 »

foxylad wrote: post #191
montefischer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow - that is the fastest loading site I've seen!

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#207

Post by chrisweekly »

strunz wrote: post #179
dimal wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I should have posted that. This is the one I use the most: https://text.bpr.org/ I forgot to save the links to the others.

Wow it's amazing how noticeably faster than is that every other website. We really messed up the internet.

Speed is the most important UX feature.

I've emphasized this, repeatedly, to ~every product owner I've worked with in my 26-year career.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#208

Post by userbinator »

neilv wrote: post #161

There is a complicating factor for a Web developer's personal Web site: resumé-driven-development (RDD). For those professionals who try to use personal side projects for RDD, so that they don't have to sabotage as many employers' projects as they would otherwise. Which leads me to this morning, for example... For an indie Web site I'm about to launch -- and for which I'm using a popular modern Web framework, mainly…

But doing it the ridiculously complex way is something that professionals can't afford not to do.

I think the tide is turning, as people are starting to realise the fragility of complexity.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#209

Post by csomar »

j2kun wrote: post #204

The author mentions that WordPress charges for everything, but after migrating off WordPress to a static site, I've found most of the features WordPress bundles together are, in total, more expensive when paid for separately. WordPress.com is $300/yr for a business account, which includes domain, newsletters, unlimited bandwidth, etc. The cheapest provider of blog->email newsletter for > 1k subscribers is already as…

You don't need netlify, Github pages or Cloudflare pages would do just fine. Email is a problem though and I'd wish you could easily integrate with your own email provider (ie: Fastmail, Gmail, etc..) to send newsletter to your 100s of subscribers.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#210

Post by AndyKelley »

pilaf wrote: post #175
codazoda wrote: post #167

I tried the SuperHTML on a hand-coded site of mine and it reported only one problem and that problem is incorrect as far as I can tell. It tells me that the ` ` tag is never opened on an HTML 5 doc with a ` ` opening tag. The author does say it's not perfect and I probably need to double-check my understanding just to be sure. In any case, it seems like a useful thing and I am also surprised I never thought it was mi…

According to the specs the tag can be fully omitted. From MDN [1]: > The start tag may be omitted if the first thing inside the element is not a comment. > The end tag may be omitted if the element is not immediately followed by a comment. 1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ht...

SuperHTML README says:

> This language server is stricter than the HTML spec whenever it would prevent potential human errors from being reported.

If your goal is to output minimal HTML, let a tool automate that. Forgetting to open is more likely a mistake than shorthand, and as shorthand it's not valuable.

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