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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#231

Post by moooo99 »

shahzaibmushtaq wrote: post #228

A professional software engineer would never think of a static site as a personal website. On the other hand, normal users don't have an understanding of static/dynamic site and which one to choose. It is entirely up to the non-greedy/greedy clowns to go for a complex CMS written in some programming language initially by themselves or a WordPress or HTML static site initially. I think the author should have told whet…

Why would a professional developer never think of a static site as a personal website?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#232

Post by nullderef »

csomar wrote: post #209
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.

I use ConvertKit for the newsletter. Its pricing is far more reasonable than MailChimp and the like. But in general, mail is more complicated than it seems, and I ended up giving up on self-hosting it.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#233

Post by gloosx »

Yet another attempt to rip up the web into extremes. In the option number 2, author is clearly trying to hide an elephant behind a curtain. Complex CMS written in PHP requires a web server, but for a collection of static HTML files this requirement is cleverly skipped?

Now when a new post added happens what?

#1. You log-in to admin panel and write a post. A row is added to the database, a worker subscribed to the table sends the row via websocket to every active visitor on the site. They download few hundred bytes of data and see the post immediately without needing to refresh their browser. If they refresh, they will get cached version of the app and data instantly, then fill in the missing post from the API.

#2. You either use SSG or you generate a new static HTML page by hand, specifically on a device which has a private key for uploading to the server. If you don't choose an SSG, then since Javascript is complex, scary and prohibited, you also change the main feed HTML to include a new post, you timestamp all the new stuff by hand, etc. You upload it to the server via ftp. Great, now new visitors of the main blog feed will see it. Active visitors will see it only if they reload the whole page (hopefully they don't load the cached version).

Being professional is not to choose an extreme. Being professional is to solve a problem, and to make the best tradeoffs possible when solving it. There are many different configurations which are somewhat in the middle of extremes provided in the post, and using any of them professionally is about using them right and fitting them to solve an issue.

You would expect all normal users, including professionals to distribute normally between your neo-web-luddite static NGINX+HTML+FTP solution and javascriptpunk2033 complex CMS.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#234

Post by hoseja »

andrepd wrote: post #221
pnt12 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's almost as if we all have supercomputers in our pockets which could easily handle text and images of only web devs didn't shove 10MB of code in an interpreted language every time time we open a page!

Half of the people on this site are those very same webdevs.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#235

Post by relistan »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

Most of the time annd energy spent on active marketing sites is content management. If marketing are the people with the budget and they are the ones who manage the content, that will be the priority. It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there’s not(?) a better alternative that solves both sides of the problem.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#236

Post by motoxpro »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

You said it yourself. The tech you're suggesting didn't meet their requirements. Once it does, they will use it. A marketing site SHOULD be optimized for the editor. This is a failure of the dev, not the marketing person.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#237

Post by zild3d »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

> based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site.

Sounds pretty user-hostile. You're talking about marketers who have a "Job to be done" which is to make content and get it in front of some target audience. Of course the editing experience trumps security and rendering speed. I'm confused why you're confused they always choose WP over figuring out text editors and git!

The experiment should be giving them a nice editing experience that behind the scenes is creating a static site and some git to deploy vs wordpress. Then maybe the secondary requirements you care mostly about will be relevant

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#238

Post by dzikimarian »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

They make choice, because they're the ones working with this daily. Their goal is to put content on display fast. Content varies a lot - often containing for eg. tables, which simply don't work well in markdown or images you need to host somewhere.

I spent a lot of time looking and still hasn't found toolchain, that would allow interns with zero technical experience deliver edits, without getting involved in tech details.

Closest one would be some headless CMS with Static site generator bolted on top, but honestly they all suck.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#239

Post by kristoff_it »

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…

`` is not paired with ``. This is what the basic HTML5 boilerplate looks like:

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#240

Post by bergie »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #230

I have whole rants about this, based on bitter experience trying to convince marketing people to stop using WP and just use a static site. It comes down to ease of editing. A WP site optimises for the editor. Not the hosting, not the tech folk, not the accountants, and definitely not the reader. The people who edit the site get to say how it's implemented. If you give them the choice (as I have) between a site that r…

Back in 2011 I built a JS-based thing for making essentially any website editable: https://bergie.iki.fi/blog/introducing_the_midgard_create_us...

This required you to add a bit of RDFa markup to identify the editable parts (including collections, so you could add a news item or whatever), and then had a Backbone.js plugin setup for implementing saving to your chosen CMS.

This all could likely be done easier today. But trick is of course figuring out how to save from browser to git. GitHub has a REST API you can use, but authentication needs a server-side component.

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