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The Static Site Paradox

kristoff.it

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Re: The Static Site Paradox

#321

Post by [deleted] »

gryfft wrote: post #27
lqet wrote: post #12

> If you didn't know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it's actually the inverse: only few professional software engineers can "afford" to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions. I am confused, the inverse would be that professional engineers have [2…

If you continue reading, the reasoning is given in the next sentence: > Weird as it might be, it's not a great mystery why that is: it's easier to spin up a Wordpress blog than it is to figure out by yourself all the intermediate steps.

[deleted]

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#322

Post by voytec »

This opening statement is confusing due to being stated as an axiom. From my experience, the majority of IT engineers considers the opposite true:

> only few professional software engineers can "afford" to have the second option as their personal website

In the quote "second option" refers to SSGs. But likely most of us here, and surely most engineers I interact with, would use the word "affordable" to describe why the first option (complex CMS like WordPress) is generally AVOIDED. The post quotes "professional engineers" or "professional software engineers". And points at SSGs as an "unaffordable" solution over WordPress.

The basis for this blog posts are however, that setting up SSG is time consuming while WP comes with less strings. Scroll to the end of this blabber to see the strings.

WordPress is not really an option for "professional software engineers". Most of us would be ashamed of having our personal websites defaced or allowing an attacked to read our databases and change entries. The "pros" own their swolutions and are careful around what that ownership entails. YOLO-approach CMS foer the personal website is simply not an option...

It's due to man-hours required to secure all the underlying dependencies (PHP, database), problems related to managing multiple system services to make a personal website work (outside of caddy, nginx etc) and how compute-heavy using WP is. And how much more knowledge (and - again - time) one needs, to harden a WP website for heavy load. You know - the "hug" thing which is not a thing with SSG-generated stupid static HTML, CSS and JS files.

Or, maybe I'll just quote the nonsense... According do the author WP is better than SSG because it doesn't require one to:

    Buy a domain
    Find a hosting platform
    Configure DNS
    Find an SSG (or handcraft everything yourself)
    Learn how to setup a deployment pipeline
I haven't spent so much dopamine on decrypting few opening paragraphs of any blog posts in a good few weeks. This blog post was "unaffordable".

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#323

Post by dzikimarian »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #254
dzikimarian wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 det…

In one case I offered to (and actually did) convert the Word docs they sent me to the appropriate Hugo markdown with front matter and push it for them (not a huge effort, maybe 10 mins per post, I was happy to do it). It worked for a bit but they still ended up pushing for a Wordpress site. So yeah, it's not down to technical experience required for the edit process.

Imagine you need to email code to someone to be committed :-)

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#324

Post by ozim »

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…

Wordpress has plugins to generate static sites. You can have your rich editing and fast loading times as well.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#325

Post by freedomben »

closewith wrote: post #259
marcus_holmes wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. It's not the developer's convenience. It's the readers. Each blog post is going to get written once, but read (hopefully) thousands of times. Why are we optimising the writing experience and not the reading experience?

Readers don't care at all whether they're served WP or a static site. The GP doesn't have a point to miss.

Sure they do. They don't know about WP or static site, but they do know about "how long does the page take to load" and does the page work properly. It's certainly possible to build a WP set up that is super fast (and basically a SSG), but the vast, vast majority of them will not be done like that. They'll be loaded with a bunch of marketing plugins that kill performance and routinely throw errors that manifest to the user as some broken button or form that won't submit properly.

It's possible, but much harder, to build a static site that performs as poorly.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#326

Post by freedomben »

hoseja wrote: post #234
andrepd wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which means pointing it out has a higher potential for bearing fruit. If we convince just one web dev to start thinking/caring about it, that's a win.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#327

Post by freedomben »

rzzzt wrote: post #168
dimal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might be selection bias, but my impression was that it is very hard to find a phone without this feature (going back to the Windows Phone and semi-smart feature phone era as well). The usual downside is that they do not spring to life unless a wired headphone is connected, because the cable is used as the antenna.

Indeed, most phones have the hardware already, but the radio isn't surfaced in the software.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#328

Post by joseda-hg »

roywiggins wrote: post #213
dimal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back in Venezuela there we're at least 2 models of the Telepatria, A phone with TV Capabilities, if I recall correctly, both models being basically modified ZTE designs

The original model did come with an external anthena, and the latest model is from 2015, no anthena needed

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#329

Post by sneak »

makeitdouble wrote: post #219
sneak wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The browser is the email client for most everyone.

For everyone else it’s the gmail app.

Re: The Static Site Paradox

#330

Post by JodieBenitez »

FalconSensei wrote: post #319
JodieBenitez wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> editors still want WP, because this or that plugin So you are saying that you are still missing functionality

Nope, I'm saying they don't need this functionality.
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