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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#241

Post by figassis »

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…

This is the issue. I'm an engineer, and I moved away from WP years ago, now I use ghost. But wordpress gives you that feeling of control, that you just need to search for "online store", and you get 100 plugins, including woocommerce, that are full blown ecommerce platforms. It's less the blogging, and more the customizable application that laymen can hammer into their desired function by clicking and dragging, no coding necessary, at least until it gets hacked or they need a real engineer to build that bespoke functinality.

But if you use Hugo, Ghost, or whatever, you get to the point of "for this you need this other platform", where platform is shopify, or an accounting system, or a social network/membership plugin, a job board, etc. Wordpress became this thing that can be turned into anything else.

So someone calls a consultant and says I want this, and they go, I'll set it up for you in Wordpress. Then, because everyone was using wordpress, it was easy to get people to help you when you had issues, or to tweak your plugins slightly, add a hook to send an email, etc. So the age of PHP consultants gave Wordpress it's dominance.

Problem is, most of these solutions, even paid ones, are not full solutions. When you start using them you quickly realize Wordpress imposes non sensical limitations. You can't architect your online store outside Wordpress's performance disaster of a entity/metadata system where any reasonably sized query takes 5 seconds and generates 50 other secondary, non optimized queries. Some plugins even try to work around this by going around wordpress and creating their own db tables out of wordpress's control.

Wordpress is horrible, not architected for anything other than a blog, but used as a tool for everything. Other CMSs don't do that, so people don't use them.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#242

Post by closewith »

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…

Your comment is the height of arrogance and user-hostility.

The idea that they should accept a sub-par solution not of their choosing just for the developer's convenience is absurd.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#243

Post by crb »

Before there was WordPress, the most popular blog CMS was Moveable Type. It had a "generate static files" option. (I believe this is how Daring Fireball is still published today.)

Surely this is the "best of both worlds" answer?

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#244

Post by wruza »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #197
wruza wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of that may be you learned to detect these behaviors and not always correctly. Another part may be old commenters getting nostalgic and/or angry (a thing in life).

Did my homework though and checked top ten threads and their first comments where all these karma people should be. All top comments are pretty HN spirited. One of these may be called nostalgic but has a specific request in it and doesn’t look like a bait.

Part of that may be my perception problem.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#245

Post by wruza »

whartung wrote: post #202
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…

> 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…

Exactly. Sometimes you see that a subthread goes sideways and just parent/root [-] it, and you’re back in the thread without parsing through non-interesting parts.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#246

Post by swiftcoder »

EasyMark wrote: post #190
Stoids wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can create web pages in excel??

These are presumably more along the lines of custom inventory management software

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#247

Post by nicbou »

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…

I switched to a SSG for the ease of editing! Offline, version-controlled editing with regular expressions, linters and other text-based magic. When you maintain a few hundred pages for a living, this is a game changer.

For the average user though, you are 100% correct. You need a UI that they will understand. Explaining git to them is not a good idea.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#248

Post by withinboredom »

nnf wrote: post #200
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…

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 w…

Heh, similar issue once, only no battery backup and the main breaker would trip instantly. So, we had power, but it wasn't coming back up. After an expensive discovery that the issue wasn't on our side, the power company had to get into the junction box and discover that the wire had melted to the metal. We were 'this close' to losing everything due to a fire. Especially because once the metal cooled down enough, the power could come back on for a few hours.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#249

Post by withinboredom »

4ggr0 wrote: post #224
andrepd wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well, people without 4G or a later phone model probably don't have the money for your $5 per month service anyways, so why care about them at all /s

I know you meant this sarcastically. BUT, when traveling, my phone has a free 3g, unlimited data plan. So, you run into these problems even in modern society.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#250

Post by marcus_holmes »

motoxpro wrote: post #236
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.

my confusion is why it's their requirements that need to get met, not say, the readers' requirements.
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