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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

#91

Post by intrasight »

intrasight wrote: post #83

I've only done static websites for a long while now. I created ThinCMS as a browser-based tool for building and publishing static web sites. It came about after I learned XSLT well enough to bend it to my will. I used it to build several public and private web sites, including two iterations of longwoodgardens.org (they've since moved to Drupal) and pittsburghtoday.org (where it is still used). XSLT ( and probably ot…

Now days I'm experimenting with client-side nested composition with HTML includes. But I'm also giving ASP.NET MVC 6 a spin.

However you go about generating the HTML that a visitor sees, you still have to content with how to create tooling that satisfies content authors. My position has always been "use whatever tools you want - I'll figure out an automated scheme to convert it". I think that with static site generators it is easier to have that separation of authoring and publishing.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#92

Post by zhte415 »

notacoward wrote: post #70
blaisco wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for the same thing, so I built it. It's a WordPress plugin that outputs a static copy of your site to a ZIP or a directory of your choice. The thought being that you put WordPress on a subdomain (e.g. wp.example.com) and have the main site (www.example.com) served by the static copy. https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/ It's still a work in progress (it launched a little over a month ago) but th…

I did something very much like this for a while. I'd use WordPress to create content on my laptop, then I'd crawl my own site using wget to collect the results and push those up to the real website. Turns out there are a few gotchas that simply-static didn't address, but I wrote a blog post about my experiences here. http://pl.atyp.us/wordpress/index.php/2013/04/using-wordpres... The older posts on my site were all c…

Crawling your own site to output a static site seems so simple it is genius. Set up a cron job every X minutes. Just... so... simple. I will do this!

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#93

Post by tremendo »

EA wrote: post #52

Anyone remember Noah Grey's "Grey Matter"? It was an inspiration to what became WordPress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatter_(software)

I do remember Greymatter when blogging was young, it was Perl-based and it was mostly replaced by Movable-type, also Perl-based before WP finally came to dominate the scene. Textpattern was also popular for a while. I believe Wordpress derived form ExpressionEngine?

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#94

Post by geraldbauer »

FYI: Join the "movement" and start a static site user group. For example, I've started the 1st one in Europe, that is, Vienna.html [1]; others in the U.S. include Static Web Tech in San Francisco [2] and {Static is} The New Dynamic in New York City [3]. Cheers. [1]:http://viennahtml.github.io [2]:http://www.staticwebtech.com [3]:http://www.meetup.com/The-New-Dynamic

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#95

Post by thenomad »

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.

HN throws about 20k - 40k visitors over a day or so, in my experience (off the top of my head, without looking at stats). My stuff tends to be tangential to the primary interests of the userbase, though, so if you were very codey / techie you might see a lot more.

Reddit depends wildly on the size and activity of the subreddit you're featured on. Imgur shows view stats, so you can get some idea from that.

For scale on whether nginx can handle that sort of load, I've had tiny VPSes sitting there happily handling 200 SIMULTANEOUS users serving static files, which translates to between 500,000 and 3 million uniques a day, maybe more depending on your site design.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#96

Post by thenomad »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #75
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Good lord. That's a lot of traffic.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#97

Post by threatofrain »

I think static site generation will simply be a feature of a build tool like Webpack or Gulp, maybe as a plugin, and either way there will be an api for developers. Or it will simply be part of a larger build chain / automation system somehow.

Static site generator doesn't mean there's no backend. A website is called 'dynamic' when its operation depends on communicating with a server. The JS logic delivered to the client can range from animation to async http requests.

The distinction between "static site generator" and Webpack / Gulp is very gray. It all depends on what you want to do with your client-side JS logic.

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#98

Post by ramon »

I think you guys are thinking small when thinking about a static site. Change the content dynamically with Javascript only is still considered a static website, this doesn't make the frontend static at all, it's very dynamic! But no more need for PHP, Perl, etc.

Best Regards

Re: Static Website Generators Are the Next Big Thing

#99

Post by Tomte »

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.

Have you had a look at Pollen, by Matthew Butterick?
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