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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#211

Post by Groxx »

Kye wrote: post #131
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…

Disqus solved this for a while, but they did various things over the years to push people away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus#Criticism,_privacy,_and... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22disqus%22 Facebook offered a commenting system a lot of sites used, but it also lost trust and reach with its scandals.

I'm also seeing a moderate number use javascript to pull activitypub replies, as those APIs are (generally) public and GET-friendly. And don't have the various spam-rolls that other free options add.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#212

Post by mythz »

There are a number of sites I wouldn't consider using anything but a static site generator for, including marketing websites, blogs, docs, etc.

You can't beat "free hosting" on GitHub Pages CDNs and the reduced maintenance burden of not needing to monitor uptime of static sites, infrastructure dependencies, OS updates, etc. They can also be maintained by editing .md files from GitHub's UI

We use them everywhere we can and maintain a number for Free SSG project templates which include GitHub Actions to publish them to your GitHub Repo's CDN for free hosting.

All templates use the same markdown format and structure to edit content making them easily to move content across different SSG templates built with different tech stacks.

[1] https://razor-ssg.web-templates.io - C# Razor SSG for Marketing Websites/Blogs/Podcasts

[2] https://razor-press.web-templates.io - C# Razor SSG for docs

[3] https://press-vue.servicestack.net - Vue SSG for Marketing Websites/Blogs/Videos

[4] https://press-react.servicestack.net - React SSG for Marketing Websites/Blogs/Videos

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#213

Post by roywiggins »

dimal wrote: post #163
dingnuts wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that situation has had me thinking about getting an amateur radio license again. In a disaster like what happened to Western NC, which encompasses a much greater area than just Asheville, I wouldn't want to rely on anything based on the Internet. You want something with a long wavelength and low power. But it's so inaccessible, and I'm not sure if it's for good reason or not. Connectivity was knocked out from Black M…

What I want is for every smartphone to have an FM radio built in. There are FM radio IC chips available, and apparently some Android phones have them. It seems like a reasonable thing to require smartphones to have them for emergencies. I had to run my car in the beginning, burning precious gas just to hear on the radio what the hell was actually happening.

I owned a series of Moto Gs that could, but with the removal of headphone jacks I am not sure how much reception you could expect. I did manage to pick up FM stations without anything plugged in but only pretty close to a transmitter.

Some phones even used to have TV tuners in them, though I don't think any of them were sold in the US.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#214

Post by roywiggins »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #92
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…

That's sort of the idea behind a Wiki, isn't it? There was an effort many years ago to provide browser extensions that allowed users to mark up, edit, and annotate existing web pages in a way that would be visible to the community of users. It never went anywhere, unfortunately, probably because it would have gored way too many sacred oxen. (And/or it would have been co-opted by spammers, turning it into a social net…

Every so often someone announces that they've reinvented that idea but it doesn't go anywhere. These days the problem is probably mostly mobile Internet, but also the sheer difficulty bootstrapping enough of a community for it to be worthwhile.

And of course any such project that became popular would either ruin the creators as they try to keep up with moderation, or devolve into an unusable mess if they don't moderate.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#215

Post by edanm »

graypegg wrote: post #68

In 2016, I was working at an agency making brochureware for local businesses. I remember one of our clients wanted us to add a small iframe for a reservation system to their website they had built. They sent us a single word document. Turns out they were just exporting it as HTML (which it seems like Word does still support today!) and throwing it onto some cheap shared web hosting provider. It worked great for them.…

We have a "Data App" built for one of our clients, which does all sorts of fancy stuff for managing their metadata, quality checks, etc.

But some of the pages have "documentation" which is basically a bunch of tables with dates and text, which they handle themselves. And the solution we landed on was very similar - they just have a Word doc with this table, they give it to us, we export it to html/css, and dump it into the appropriate place.

It's not elegant and not a scalable solution, but for the use cases where it's relevant, it's the easiest way, hands down.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#216

Post by jasonkester »

Stoids wrote: post #122
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love when businesses do stuff like this. If it works, it works. My job isn't to ridicule them because it could be better, but make their solution better and ensure my solution for them works as well as theirs, if not better, without hampering the success they already had with what they were doing already. A lot of developers don't want to admit this—in my experience at least—but tons of these ad-hoc web solutions a…

I do consulting for a few restaurants, and despite my experience building full-stack web applications, I find myself reaching for Excel for most of my deliverables. These are "applications" that "non-technical" restaurant operators need to be comfortable in. Having a sheet where they paste in some data and get their needed output has required the least amount of continued maintenance and training. They can drag the f…

It’s a shame that Access died, because that’s what you would have built this in 25 years ago, and it would have been better for your client in every respect.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#217

Post by safety1st »

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…

So Hacker News and "real programmers" continually underestimate the foundational concept of a CMS. They consider it to be unsexy tech and therefore all problems around it must be solved and boring problems, and therefore they aren't actually aware of what any of those problems are.

The WordPress ecosystem is of course the polar opposite of this, it's populated by billions of dollars worth of businesses that understand intimately what the people operating CMSes and websites in their little niche of that market need, the size of this market is 500 million websites or so.

I'm sure the guy who wrote this article is a smart guy. But he is obviously not smart about the practical uses of a CMS if his worldview is "static HTML sites are better but aren't popular because of evil corporations." You really only need to get paid to build a website once or twice to realize that a static HTML site generator is almost never going to do everything that your customer wants it to do. WordPress realized how vast and varied this market is many years ago and that's why they implemented support for plugins.

You're 100% right comments is like the original use case for having something more like a CMS on the web instead of a static site generator. But there are also a million others.

You just don't get that far with static HTML documents. As soon as you move beyond some minimalist developer's blog you need programmatic logic, and lots of it, to do everything the actual users and customers want you to do. So you use a CMS, whatever CMS fits your needs. And you cache aggressively if you want that site to stand up under a lot of traffic, that's part of the job.

For the life of me, I will never understand why all these devs who think they're so shit-hot want to reinvent the wheel instead of just learn a bit about how caching works, and employ it! Is it another one of those solved problems that's too boring for them?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#218

Post by lelanthran »

echoangle wrote: post #106
dhotson wrote: post #14

Most people's expectations of what a "basic website" should do have gone way up over time. Even as a programmer, I've fallen into the static site generator trap a few times. It's annoying to start a side project with a static site generator and then realise I want to add a small feature and suddenly I wish I'd just started with a simple Rails or PHP app. Nowadays, if I want a static site I just start with a folder of…

How are you handling commonality between pages with plain html pages? As long as you don’t use iframes, you have to manually sync everything that’s shared or almost the same on alle pages (header, footer, navigation). That’s pretty annoying.

> How are you handling commonality between pages with plain html pages?

I have a simple web component that lets me do ``.

That's basically 90% of what a more complex solution will give you.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#219

Post by makeitdouble »

sneak wrote: post #201
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…

An email address is the best contact form. Anything else is overengineering.

Email has surprising hurdles IMHO.

For instance it means leaving the browser and have the default email client handling it. For some people it becomes a distraction, for other they didn't even setup the default client so it's a setup screen and hey have to copy/paste the email to their gmail tab.

Other people actually don't want to give their email but will give a phone number, or their Twitter handle, a chat ID, or their address, or anything else really.

A form is more maintenance, but can be pretty beneficial to address a general public.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#220

Post by andrepd »

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…

Plus, what you call "shitty 3G" is (a) not really that bad objectively speaking (better than dialup 20 so years ago), and (b) actually the norm for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. I always think it's very depressing and even hypocritical how little the average SV dev cares about anyone with less than an iphone 15 with 4G in their pocket.
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