4 ms·

Static sites are great for simplicity, but IMO we should be striving for more interaction not less. If I open a blog I want to be able to host comments and not

Static sites are great for simplicity, but IMO we should be striving for more interaction not less. If I open a blog I want to be able to host comments and not rely on email or third party services. Maybe we need a hybrid site generator. We could still write the content as seperate text files, but we would have the ability to integrate comment sections, user profiles etc. seemlessly. Our posts could be parsed and recorded onto a database, for better indexing, search, analytics and reducing redundancies. The generator would come with a web server and handle everything we throw at it. From ssl to comments to databases. That's the future I dream of. Not full blown CMSs, but not web 1.0 either.

overcast 8y ago
Sounds great, but comments are the first thing I'd prefer just disappear from the internet. I understand that is what brings users, but they are generally cess pools of assholes and spammers.
- kqr 8y ago
  I agree. Comment sections tend to be really hard to moderate. I accept comments via email and then I manually add them to articles as part of the main text. This is a largely self-moderating system because only when a reader honesly thinks their comment is important do they bother emailing. While I always respond, I only include the comment in the article if I think it is of greater value to the community at large. It's not ideal, but it is as close as I have come to showing someone an article and asking for their comments IRL.
  - overcast 8y ago
    That's a massive amount of work though. Is there nothing to come from all of this "machine learning" nonsense talk, putting it to actual good use automating this?
Hamcha 8y ago
It's probably not that hard to build something like that yourself. I remember my first project on Github back when I thought web development was PHP and nothing else was something that felt like a static site generator (all my articles were hand written XML pages with markdown blocks) but would generate blog indexes etc (including its own comment section) by parsing the XML and rendering them to "components" (basically php pages that handled content and arguments and returned HTML). It also had a super simple caching bit (like most forums/blogs do anyway) so it was almost static I guess.
ncphillips 8y ago
A lot of people are doing these things already! The Forestry.io blog has a number of articles covering some of these topics: * eCommerce – https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-si... * Search – https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ * Forms – https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-stat... * Advanced Image Handling: https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudinary/ https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudina... * Building APIs – https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ Regarding user profiles, the Forestry website itself is built with Hugo and has a Rails app to handle profiles. EDIT I know you don't want to rely on third party services, but if it's possible to handle this with third party services then surely open source alternatives could be built.

overcast 8y ago

Sounds great, but comments are the first thing I'd prefer just disappear from the internet. I understand that is what brings users, but they are generally cess pools of assholes and spammers.

kqr 8y ago
I agree. Comment sections tend to be really hard to moderate. I accept comments via email and then I manually add them to articles as part of the main text. This is a largely self-moderating system because only when a reader honesly thinks their comment is important do they bother emailing. While I always respond, I only include the comment in the article if I think it is of greater value to the community at large. It's not ideal, but it is as close as I have come to showing someone an article and asking for their comments IRL.
- overcast 8y ago
  That's a massive amount of work though. Is there nothing to come from all of this "machine learning" nonsense talk, putting it to actual good use automating this?

Hamcha 8y ago

It's probably not that hard to build something like that yourself. I remember my first project on Github back when I thought web development was PHP and nothing else was something that felt like a static site generator (all my articles were hand written XML pages with markdown blocks) but would generate blog indexes etc (including its own comment section) by parsing the XML and rendering them to "components" (basically php pages that handled content and arguments and returned HTML). It also had a super simple caching bit (like most forums/blogs do anyway) so it was almost static I guess.

ncphillips 8y ago

A lot of people are doing these things already! The Forestry.io blog has a number of articles covering some of these topics: * eCommerce – https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-si... * Search – https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/ * Forms – https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-static-site/ https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-stat... * Advanced Image Handling: https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudinary/ https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudina... * Building APIs – https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/ Regarding user profiles, the Forestry website itself is built with Hugo and has a Rails app to handle profiles. EDIT I know you don't want to rely on third party services, but if it's possible to handle this with third party services then surely open source alternatives could be built.