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Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#71

Post by drzaiusapelord »

voyou wrote: post #53
ohitsdom wrote: post #39

I'm still looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress (so with a UI, not markdown). Anyone know of something that fits the bill?

If you're looking for a static site generator that's as easy to use as Wordpress, you could consider using Wordpress. Wordpress caching plugins can generate static HTML which then gets served to visitors directly by Apache or Nginx, without hitting PHP at all.

...and this is why we're not moving to SSGs even though this almost exact article gets posted monthly here.

Its trivial to put in a cache level that generates and stores static html in from of WP, Drupal, etc. So you get both worlds; the tools that dynamic CMS's give you and the performance of a static site.

I think it took me 5 minutes to install varnish on a WP server I have. Varnish delivers these pages straight from ram. My page load performance is fairly absurd. If that's too technically daunting or your webhost doesn't support varnish, totalcache is also good. Boost for Drupal is good too.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#72

Post by vidarh »

grandalf wrote: post #46
spjwebster wrote: post #28

Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take. Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates for the PHP-based frontend servers to evaluate at request time. The idea was that you put as much of your logic as possible into the template generation layer, leaving the request-time logic to h…

this is the first story I've heard that explains why Yahoo's navigation is so horrible and why your logged in state on your yahoo account doesn't follow you to different yahoo sites (business, mail, etc.)

That doesn't really explain it. Stuff that really needed to be dynamic would be. But we (I was at Yahoo 2003-2005) took privacy seriously and a lot of seeming quirks of login state etc. were well thought through and had good reasons. E.g. we were regularly reminded not to mingle data that identified browsers (that could "follow" an unlogged in user across sites) with data that identified users (as that would let us tie a userid to data the user explicitly had not knowingly shared with us).

And many particularly personal properties such as mail, or the billing system (my area), would take extra precautions about what information could be made available on other properties (e.g. what info from mail could be shown on the homepage) even if the user was logged in, to prevent leaking information that shouldn't leak. This would lead to extra logins that I'm sure seemed unnecessary, and logins where the user probably thought they were already logged in, but where non-personal information was keyed to the browser rather than their user id.

I'm sure there are bugs and unintentional quirks too - the system was crazy complex already in 2005, but I really hope they've stuck to their guns when it comes to how carefully they treated personal data back then.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#73

Post by vidarh »

mtmail wrote: post #59
spjwebster wrote: post #28

Every time static generation rears its head, I'm reminded of Yahoo!'s ... unique... take. Back in 2006 when I worked for Yahoo!, and they had a CMS / template management system called Jake that statically generated templates for the PHP-based frontend servers to evaluate at request time. The idea was that you put as much of your logic as possible into the template generation layer, leaving the request-time logic to h…

Jake was built for news articles and prerendered all pages. News staff was able to quickly localize templates (10+ lanuages, 20+ products). That was 1999 when we didn't use Javascript or CSS, tested pages on Netscape Navigator 2 and WML (for mobile phones) became hot topic. Later Jake was misused for all kinds of other products mainly because of locali[sz]ation, permission management etc. Yeah, debugging was hard. It…

> Yahoo hired Rasmus Lerdorf and switched to PHP starting 2002.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. When I left Yahoo Europe in 2005, there was still Perl all over the place both in Europe and the US at least. I managed the Yahoo Europe billing system, and that was mostly Perl on the backend, for example.

[small world, btw., courtesy of some minor profile-stalking: I interviewed with Ed about a position a few years back; your service looks interesting - I have a client that might be interested]

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#74

Post by icebraining »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
thenomad wrote: post #2

I've been a fan of static websites for a long while now. In addition to page load issues, they also more or less completely solve the Slashdot effect (aka the Reddit Hug Of Death, these days). A competently-configured Nginx server on a 512mb VPS, serving static-only content, will handle ridiculous amounts of traffic without flinching. Ever since a front-page mention on BoingBoing took down my feature film BloodSpell'…

Do you - or anyone - have stats about the possible traffic demands of Slashdot/Reddit/HN front page stardom? I'm very much in the Nginx/static camp, but it would be useful to know how bad the spikes can get.

Here's one for HN, though Reddit can get much worse: https://levels.io/hacker-news-number-one/

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#75

Post by PuffinBlue »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
thenomad wrote: post #2

I've been a fan of static websites for a long while now. In addition to page load issues, they also more or less completely solve the Slashdot effect (aka the Reddit Hug Of Death, these days). A competently-configured Nginx server on a 512mb VPS, serving static-only content, will handle ridiculous amounts of traffic without flinching. Ever since a front-page mention on BoingBoing took down my feature film BloodSpell'…

Do you - or anyone - have stats about the possible traffic demands of Slashdot/Reddit/HN front page stardom? I'm very much in the Nginx/static camp, but it would be useful to know how bad the spikes can get.

I spoke with Alan Bellows from 'Damn Interesting'[0] on Reddit after his site hit the front page via a TIL post and he revealed a little about the traffic load.[1]

It was very interesting to see and was quite a lot of traffic for sure.

Bear in mind that the screenshot he posted is for concurrent visitors too.

[0] http://www.damninteresting.com/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct/til_a...

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#76

Post by Albright »

bigethan wrote: post #40

... because Javascript and external APIs can now do so much. If I can do everything with JS on the visitors browser, why not host some shell HTML on S3 and never worry about a server? Maybe hit AWS Lambda if need be for one specific thing? Dunno. The age of the do everything server seems to be coming to a close.

Progressive enhancement truly is dead. :(

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#77

Post by [deleted] »

davexunit wrote: post #31

The reason I like static site generators so much is because it allows me to treat my website as a program that outputs a website. Take some posts in whichever format you prefer, write a program to parse them as a tree of HTML nodes, insert them into templates for HTML pages, Atom feeds, etc. It's all just plain text code and markup, no stateful database with a dynamic web application in front doing everything.

[deleted]

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#78

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

I love pelican as a generator, it's great

The one static generator I wish there was (unless there is one and I just haven't found it) is one that would take a tree of code files and display it kinda like github does, in a browsable file browser hierarchy with syntax highlighting when drilling down to individual files.

Kind of like a precompiled static file browser, there are several dynamic file browsers around but they all require server-side code (php usually) to do the directory listing and so on, but I think it should be possible to precompute all the directory display pages with symlinks to the individual files, and do the highlighting in those in JS/CSS

I might end up writing this at some point as it's definitely an itch I'd like scratching unless it does exist already and somebody kindly points me to it

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#79

Post by nstart »

I'm currently building my own static site CMS. Basically. Word press like interface (at some point). Spits out a static site. My blog http://adnanissadeen.com runs on it. I'm building the CMS over at https://github.com/spartakode/static-cms . Been inactive for a while because I'm just a horrible procrastinator. I'll be finishing up (read: making it usable by public) end of this year hopefully. Will try and offer a hosted service a little later.
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