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Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

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Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#51

Post by victorbjorklund »

audiodude wrote: post #48

I have an understanding of static site generators, I've used several of them and even written my own. But I simply don't understand what this is or what it's doing. You're using a sqlite database during site generation time instead of .md files? You're definitely not querying the db at serve time right? I'm so confused...

Say you have a site about pokemons. Then you can have all the pokemons in a sql database (with a schema) instead of a bunch of MD files. Not all static sites are just blogposts.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#52

Post by ozim »

I might be old fashioned but this seems like something static site generators shouldn’t do.

I can see how someone is grabbing it and regenerating content on data change and then if data changes often enough you are back to dynamic templating engines. Then nagging how awful it is for such use case and staring to build „new thing” that was already in RoR or else.

If you have data in a database most likely better to use RoR or whatever else you fancy.

But hey this might still be useful for some one off jobs.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#53

Post by audiodude »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #51
audiodude wrote: post #48

I have an understanding of static site generators, I've used several of them and even written my own. But I simply don't understand what this is or what it's doing. You're using a sqlite database during site generation time instead of .md files? You're definitely not querying the db at serve time right? I'm so confused...

Say you have a site about pokemons. Then you can have all the pokemons in a sql database (with a schema) instead of a bunch of MD files. Not all static sites are just blogposts.

Right, looking again I understand better. Instead of a bunch of shaky YAML in a md file, you have properly structured data.

Isn't this what Gatsby tries to do with GraphQL?

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#54

Post by gjtorikian »

klandergren wrote: post #34

Nice! Great to see innovation in the Jekyll space. Quick FYI on Jekyll performance: I noticed slow generation times on one of my sites and traced it to a plugin that was spawning a git process to get the last commit info for every page. I wrote a drop-in replacement called jekyll-last-commit[0] that uses the ruby libgit2 wrapper for improved performance. Details on its origins are in an old HN comment[1] if you are i…

Oh hey that’s me! Glad you found it useful and thanks for carrying the torch forward.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#55

Post by captn3m0 »

arp242 wrote: post #41
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #38

I wish if there was some hugo alternative to it , I guess I am going to go into the weeds of this project to replicate it in golang

Hugo more or less is "Jekyll, replicated in Go". The core problem you will run into is that Go is a very static language, and Ruby is a very dynamic "free for all" language. Obviously up- and downsides to both approaches, but IMHO Ruby is clearly a much better fit for this sort of thing. On my own Jekyll website I do syntax highlighting with Vim's :TOhtml. I like how my Vim looks and I know how to tweak Vim syntax fi…

Hugo got a WASM based plugin system, but real scripting plugins that would be needed for SQLite are still a feature request: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/5510

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#56

Post by captn3m0 »

tonymet wrote: post #30

Great project. I've long thought about creating a static-site transformer for wordpress sites via SQLLite-- in order to reduce costs and improve security. The idea would be to feed the wordpress content into a sqlite DB and re-publish the entire site as a static site. Since wordpress comments have declined in usage, this should work well. Publishing time would be a bit slower, but reads will be 100x faster and 10000x…

Wordpress now has (almost production ready) SQLite support, and there’s plugins like https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ so this might already be possible.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#57

Post by captn3m0 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #39
anticorporate wrote: post #28

This is awesome, and would solve an actual problem I've been thinking through... if only I had selected Jekyll for my static site generator. Does anyone know of a similar solution for Hugo? Technically I'm sure I could run a script to generate .md (or a format like .csv that Hugo can work with) from my database, but this seems like it might be easier for a database that updates frequently.

Oh my god , I had written the exact same comment when seeing this for the first time , and then I scrolled to see your comment. Xd , definitely felt a bit of deja vu. Yeh I am genuinely interested in this project. but I don't think I have the technical prowess to manage it , but I am going to try but I hope that others could somehow create it as well (since I have created nothing open source which people care about)

When I started this project, I seriously consider building it for Hugo, but the plugin system actively disallows such things, there’s no scope for dynamic plugins like these.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#58

Post by captn3m0 »

ozim wrote: post #52

I might be old fashioned but this seems like something static site generators shouldn’t do. I can see how someone is grabbing it and regenerating content on data change and then if data changes often enough you are back to dynamic templating engines. Then nagging how awful it is for such use case and staring to build „new thing” that was already in RoR or else. If you have data in a database most likely better to use…

If your dataset isn’t large, and your change cadence isn’t too fast - it works well.

I use it at BLR.today, where I curate events happening in Bangalore. The dataset updates roughly 4 times a day, and generating 100 pages 4 times a day is simpler than running an always on server.

The endgame for me would be to roll this into running a Jekyll-lite engine on the edge, against a SQlite database locally available to the edge compute.

Re: Show HN: SQLite Plugin for Jekyll

#59

Post by berkes »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #44
giancarlostoro wrote: post #14

In wake of all the WP craziness a few weeks back, I wonder how long before someone builds a "best of both worlds" CMS to rival WordPress. "You get the nice admin UI, but it generates a static site" type of thing.

There are a lot of those. Even Wordpress has a solution for that where it generates a static site.

They have been around for over a decade. Ghost, strapi, grav, etc etc.

Many are far more user-friendly than WP. All are more secure, better performing, most easier to develop on¹ and several have far better fitting architectures and concepts for common use-cases.

Yet WP continues to churn along. It has it's "marketing" going for it. It has a familiar name, it is predictable (you know what cr*p and legacy you're signing up for, as a techie), and therefore it remains a popular choice. Which is a metric many people use to choose a tech stack on, so it's a flyweel.

You've probably not heard about any of the simple, secure, fast, static-file, build-on-CI, nice-UIs CMSs out there. They are there. You can use them to replace your WP. Yes, even if you have a staff of 20+ web-editors that have never even heard about something like "CI", "Git" or commandlines.

¹ I've been Drupal and WP developer from early 2000-s to early 2010-s. I've founded a few webhosting companies specialised in WP hosting. I've helped hundreds, maybe thousands of ppl with "WP stopped working last week, can you have a look". WP development is a ghetto full of dumpsterfires, with, if you know where to look, are very disciplined, avoid 95% of the "streets" (ecosystem), some gems.

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