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Static site generator for non-technical people: 1. Write your article in Microsoft Word. 2. Save as 'Web Page, Filtered' 3. Upload/Place in html folder o
by Jaruzel 7y ago
Static site generator for non-technical people:
1. Write your article in Microsoft Word.
2. Save as 'Web Page, Filtered'
3. Upload/Place in html folder on Webserver.
Almost everyone has access to a copy of Word, if not I think LibreOffice has a html save function also.
This solution is 100% wrong for us technical people, but for non-techies who just want to get the information out there it's a really good option imho.
- Animats 7y agoAlso available, Blue Griffon, which is an open-source successor to Dreamweaver. It offers templates and CSS, and what's uploaded is a totally static page unless you stick in something dynamic like a form.
- petepete 7y agoWow, I didn't realise Nvu had been resurrected. This looks great for basic publishing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu
- e12e 7y agoInteresting. That's: http://bluegriffon.org http://bluegriffon.org https://github.com/therealglazou/bluegriffon https://github.com/therealglazou/bluegriffon I guess the epub part isn't open source?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThanks for mentioning Filtered in step 2. I always thought Word generates a ridiculously messy tag soup, but that's in default HTML export. I tested it with Filtered now, and the final markup is surprisingly clean. It actually is a half-decent solution for static HTML generation. Wish I knew that in the past.
- hawski 7y agoIs there something like Filtered option for LibreOffice?
- jeromenerf 7y agoItem #3 would be the most difficult task of the lot for "non techies" in my experience: FTP client, web hosting setup, ... I taught a class (10 people, master's degree, journalists) about web and publishing, with no prior experience. We used gitlab pages and hugo, with the intent of getting some hands on experience with web tech and owning an actual project and website. Markdown writing and HTML/CSS hacking went smoothly but most of all, students were impressed by the experience of getting a website online, with their content, in a matter of minutes, all in the browser. In comparison, registering for some HTTP/FTP plan somewhere and using a FTP client can be quite daunting. There are some "dropbox based" website generator services that could make the publishing workflow even easier.
- Jaruzel 7y agoOk so we've identified where the friction is - how can we improve on that for the lay person?
- aesyondu 7y agoHow about https://www.netlify.com https://www.netlify.com? Recently had to teach a non-tech person how to host a website from scratch. With all the non-trivial requirements (dns, vps, web server), I thought it would be easiest to just use netlify. That way, a git push on the repo will deploy the site immediately.
- j_4 7y ago"A push on the git repo" is not something I would think trivial for a non-tech person. However, netlify also supports just drag-and-dropping a zip onto the dashboard. That's probably as easy as it gets.
- levosmetalo 7y agoBut then you need to create that zip file with the appropriate folder and file structure. I fear that would be too much to ask for then non-technical person that struggles with doing git commit.
- lucideer 7y ago> Almost everyone has access to a copy of Word This really really isn't anywhere near true anymore. Also, as mentioned, the complexity of bullet point 3 is enormously understated. MANY MANY SaaS options like Squarespace or even Netlify or Siteleaf are in themselves much simpler than your step 3.
- nvrspyx 7y agoGoogle Docs (and many note taking apps) let you export to HTML as well. Word Online lets you "transform" a document into a website and gives you a link to send to others, but it's not really the same since there's preset themes and none of them are as simple as a Word/Doc/Note exported as pure HTML.
- markandrewj 7y ago<insert dreamweaver joke here> I am sort of surprised at how talk about static websites is only becoming top of mind as of recent. When I think of static websites used with success, I always think of Obama's campaign, it was built with Jekyll. There was quite a bit of talk around static websites around that time, and it seemed like quite a few people were on-board with the idea. When people talk about static website generators though, I don't think many people are talking about tools like dreamweaver.
- WorldMaker 7y agoA lot more people would be talking about tools like Dreamweaver (and FrontPage) if they weren't a long time gone. It's been nearly two decades from the last "proper" release. Some of the spirit of Dreamweaver lives on in other tools in Adobe's Creative Cloud, but also are harder to use, and more expensive.
- markandrewj 7y agoI think of dreamweaver more as a wysiwyg tool than a static site generator. Although you can obviously generate static sites with it, I don't think it really fits the modern workflows I would associate with static site generators.
- WorldMaker 7y agoDreamweaver and FrontPage both had very nascent/early ideas towards Content Management, they weren't "just" WYSIWYG tools towards the end. Given how much work goes into making static site generators WYSIWYG when building content (such as tools like Netlify CMS), the "ideal" is probably somewhere in the middle. Had PHP hosting not got so cheap so quickly and subsequently early PHP CMSes become so common, it's possible there was an alternate universe where Dreamweaver or FrontPage continued to evolve into really interesting static site generating Content Management Systems.
- Proven 7y agoI agree. Or just create a README and upload pics to Github. Also easy and works OK.