Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 370 posts

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#291

Post by possibleworlds »

Aeolun wrote: post #271
zild3d wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 edito…

> 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 That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is…

Just install any old file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler or Gator Cache and a Wordpress install becomes a static site for every single request until content is updated. Takes all of 5 minutes, win win for all involved.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#292

Post by eru »

zaphar wrote: post #290
eru wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Asheville in SV? In any case, in places like eg India 4G is more common than 3G. 3G is being phased out. 5G is rolling out. (I realise that India isn't the poorest of the poor anymore. But not sure that's necessary for your argument?)

Asheville is in Western North Carolina

Thanks. Yes, that's what Google told me, too. I was just confused by andrepd's accusation.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#294

Post by possibleworlds »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #257
figassis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Trying to explain to someone how static sites work vs how WP works, and that the server has to literally recreate the entire page from a bunch of database entries (having first compiled all the PHP files into something the server understands) for every single page request . It's crazy that we ended up with this powering most of the web.

A simple file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler saves every page as static html and uses Apache rewrite rules to serve those files until invalidated, bypassing php entirely. It is trivially easy to install and configure.

Free tier cloudflare caching basically does the same, host your dns on cloudflare, turn CDN on for a record, and whatever users request from that IP gets cached statically, distributed across and served by Cloudflare’s global cdn.

For more interactive database heavy applications like ecommerce you can go deeper with opcode and object caching, but none of it is that complicated. There are plenty of managed solutions that do all of this for you.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#295

Post by _heimdall »

possibleworlds wrote: post #291
Aeolun wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 That’s not their job. Their job is to sell stuff (or make it more likely to be bought anyway). How they sell stuff is something they can determine themselves. You’d think that at some level the ‘faster websites sell more’ speech gets through to them, but the important distinction there is…

Just install any old file based caching plugin like KeyCdn Cache Enabler or Gator Cache and a Wordpress install becomes a static site for every single request until content is updated. Takes all of 5 minutes, win win for all involved.

A bit off topic since the thread here was related to performance, but caching in WP doesn't solve the other big problem of security.

A caching layer can indeed make WP act much like a static site, though the cache still lives on your server rather than a global CDN layer. Behind that cache, though, you still have the live WP server with all the potential security risks that come with it.

Caching is a nice perf gain, but if you want a static site anyway there are still major gains to be made with a proper static site distributed globally.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#296

Post by handzhiev »

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.

You only need to allow PHP to run in .html files (if you insist your files being named .html(

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#297

Post by __mattya »

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…

Buncombe honestly did a much better job than the surrounding counties. Up here in Madison County most of the updates were only posted on Facebook. A lot of the updates from here and surrounding counties were posted on Facebook as photos of text or videos with no caption.

I get that these counties don’t have the budget or the technical staff for this but it’s really unfortunate.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#298

Post by JodieBenitez »

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…

My experience as well !

And even when we do give WP-like ease of editing with background static generation, editors still want WP, because this or that plugin.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#299

Post by lsaferite »

macspoofing wrote: post #286
fragmede wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

use WP to generate the site and then serve it statically as much as you can

Sure - and in principle 'someone' should go and setup this pipeline. I can guarantee you that if this process is reasonably transparent to the marketing folks, they will not care. Or do you expect the marketing folks to go and setup this static page caching?

WP has plugins to publish as a static site already. They just don't seem to be very commonly used. You get the 'ease' of the WP admin UI and the 'safety/speed' of a static site.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#300

Post by ano-ther »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #250
motoxpro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The marketers care quite a lot about the readers. After all, their goal is to reach them with glorious content so they do something.

This leads them to aim for “reasonably performant for the users” as part of optimizing the package of reader + marketer experience.

In that view, IT requirements such as security rank between “should be standard” to “don’t really care” (at least until the first compromise).

Post reply on HN