11 ms·

Sure, it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. Try having a top-menu in your design, or some banners/ads, and then you need to

Sure, it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. Try having a top-menu in your design, or some banners/ads, and then you need to change ALL the pages to change a single url. This is how we used to do things long time ago, and it sucked BIG TIME, and that's why people invented server-side includes and cgi and mod_php and all of that... it saves time, and your time costs much more than hardware...

411111111111111 6y ago
To be fair, static site generators are a thing and are very much underused in cooperations. He could have the same scores/performance and still get the full advantages you mentioned. But yes, handcrafting html is pointless at some point, especially if you have to update the contents every so often
- lazyjeff 6y ago
  A static site generator requires a toolchain, being platform-aware, updating dependencies, etc. Sometimes I think of these things as labor for a new employee (if you need to onboard a new maintainer) on a new system (if you need to switch hosts or upgrade the disk/OS). It's probably about 2-4 hours for an experienced developer to figure out how to setup and maintain a static site generator assuming no unexpected problems, then get familiar with the syntax and structure, so hopefully the labor savings from using a static site generator is worth that.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    A static site generator requires the cat command. I don't see how you can call yourself "lazyjeff" when you've just written this, tbh.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  "I looked at static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, 11ty, but all of these require tooling installed, have a build step and will ultimately need some updates or be abandoned by their maintainer." - from the article
  - specialp 6y ago
    Yes and to that point you could use something like Hugo, generate a static HTML site. Then with that static site in HTML/CSS you are no worse off the solution the author proposes even if that generator became completely abandoned and unusable the next day. But in the meantime your work would be a LOT easier if you are doing anything at all with headers/menus/accessibility
- josefresco 6y ago
  > To be fair, static site generators are a thing There goes your super-lean stack and we're back to square-one.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    Not necessarily, because I didn't specify the tool. You can even use pure bash to generate it if you want.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    If you know what you want you could write a trivial script which just pushes a Markdown file through pandoc(unless you just write html), concatenates it with the files for the header and footer (& maybe an inlined stylesheet) and appends a link to the index file. The result will be the same but applying changes on all pages is a matter of seconds. Nothing against a lightweight stack, but simplicity doesn't necessarily have to exclude functionality.
    - gerikson 6y ago
      This was essentially my first blog.
- rchaud 6y ago
  He mentions that SSGs require tooling and dependencies. And if all you need are dynamic headers and footers, just wrap those in 'php include' tags and rename the files to .php. It's still HTML and CSS that's getting rendered.
  - indigodaddy 6y ago
    I’m not a web guy—- this should be safe from php vulnerabilities I would think, because there is no db and it’s just taking advantage of very limited/basic features of php right?
    - tommyage 6y ago
      Php vulnerabilities are introduced by the developer.
    - rchaud 6y ago
      The number of vulnerabilities is vastly reduced due to the static nature of the site. You aren't buying anything on it, or inputting other kinds of data that needs to be written to a database. It may as well be a read-only site.
  - z3t4 6y ago
    I've used both server side rendering and server side includes. A static site generator beats both. Just have a listener that will re-generate the site live when you write new content, then just ssh/ftp the generated content to the server when you are done, or if you are fancy you can use version control and push to a repo with a CI toolchain that will regenerate and ssh/ftp it for you.
steren 6y ago
My article covers that: > So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.
- Hitton 6y ago
  >The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires. Other people use static site generation, you use search and replace in your editor - not much of difference. Your approach is slower in long term, but with your on average 1 article per year it will take some time until you reach the threshold.
  - lhorie 6y ago
    Eh, I don't think a person can ever write enough articles and rewrite their layout enough times that search+replace overhead ends up bigger than the upfront time it takes to read jekyll/hugo/whatever docs (plus debugging idiosyncrasies, etc). And even if search and replace was slower overall, you might be looking at a difference of minutes over a period of decades (i.e. it wouldn't actually matter in any practical sense). Far too often I see people spend days to save 2 seconds (and then proceed to not realize the savings over a long enough timespan)
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      In reality the time saved isn't the only significant factor though, humans aren't machines after all. I'll gladly "waste" a bit more time if that time makes the process more enjoyable in the end.
- andai 6y ago
  You forgot to mention the main benefits! Your website does not fingerprint my device, nor present me with a dark pattern infested "do you want us to send your data to 50 ad networks" popup.
LeonenTheDK 6y ago
This is the exact thing I experienced and have been dealing with the past couple days. I wanted to create a small collection of pages as my website, intending to keep everything as small and simple as possible since it was (mostly) just to display some basic info and "posts". Well as soon as I wanted that menu for pages it was a whole new can of worms. Sure, I could just copy/paste/replace content as it changes. But I don't want to have to be doing that any time I decide I want to change or add something. And I'm known to be a source of human error. I ended up going Node+Express+EJS for the includes and certain more dynamic content on pages. It works well enough, page sizes are still small. Also considered some static site generators but at the time they seemed like overkill for what I wanted. Maybe there's a tool out there that will compile to plain old HTML files that I'm unaware of, I don't keep up much on front-end things.
- mouzogu 6y ago
  HTML, CSS and SSI includes would be an easier option. If you don't want to deal with Node.
  - LeonenTheDK 6y ago
    I was unaware of SSI, thanks for pointing it out. I'll be taking a look at that tonight.
  - robertoandred 6y ago
    How do you set the state of a nav with SSI? Does it know what the page being built is?
    - mouzogu 6y ago
      You can use variables in SSI and if/else conditions. So you could set state based on the URL or other environment variables. It's actually fairly powerful and you can get quite a lot done with it. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html
Shared404 6y ago
> it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. It's not that hard even with. My stack consists of HTML/CSS, and a small program to stitch headers and footers onto documents generated with markdown. If anyone would like to see it, it should be in the Sourcehut page linked in my profile. The program is a hacky (but functional) piece of garbage however. E: Spelling
- scooble 6y ago
  I did this. Had a header template, a footer template and a bunch of pages. My build script was basically ‘for page in pages cat header page footer > ouput’. Worked fine for its purpose (which was limited in scope).
  - Shared404 6y ago
    That's just about what mine does as well, except pages will inherit headers above them in the directory structure, so I could make the top bar pretty without JS.
eurasiantiger 6y ago
Just create the header/footer as static SVG, embed as <object>, let http/2 handle the rest.
- waldir 6y ago
  Interesting. Can you share an example of this working?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
onion2k 6y ago
Back in the old days of web development in 1999 there was a great app called Adobe Pagemill for making changes across thousands of HTML pages. It was great. These days you can do the same thing with about 5 lines of Python.
asddubs 6y ago
to cover slightly more use cases, you could go for <?php include "header.php"; ?> like it's 2002, and then have that file just be plain html also. Of course if you're gonna pitch a solution that's impractical in most cases, you might as well go for the most extreme variant of that solution and not bother with that
alpaca128 6y ago
> it saves time, and your time costs much more than hardware... And the user's time doesn't? If you can shave off a bit of loading/processing time for every request you will have improved the experience for countless people. Sure, using just HTML+CSS is a bit extreme, but for many sites the removal of some social media embeddings/trackers and switch to static site generation could improve it by an order of magnitude.

411111111111111 6y ago

To be fair, static site generators are a thing and are very much underused in cooperations. He could have the same scores/performance and still get the full advantages you mentioned. But yes, handcrafting html is pointless at some point, especially if you have to update the contents every so often

lazyjeff 6y ago
A static site generator requires a toolchain, being platform-aware, updating dependencies, etc. Sometimes I think of these things as labor for a new employee (if you need to onboard a new maintainer) on a new system (if you need to switch hosts or upgrade the disk/OS). It's probably about 2-4 hours for an experienced developer to figure out how to setup and maintain a static site generator assuming no unexpected problems, then get familiar with the syntax and structure, so hopefully the labor savings from using a static site generator is worth that.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  A static site generator requires the cat command. I don't see how you can call yourself "lazyjeff" when you've just written this, tbh.
egypturnash 6y ago
"I looked at static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, 11ty, but all of these require tooling installed, have a build step and will ultimately need some updates or be abandoned by their maintainer." - from the article
- specialp 6y ago
  Yes and to that point you could use something like Hugo, generate a static HTML site. Then with that static site in HTML/CSS you are no worse off the solution the author proposes even if that generator became completely abandoned and unusable the next day. But in the meantime your work would be a LOT easier if you are doing anything at all with headers/menus/accessibility
josefresco 6y ago
> To be fair, static site generators are a thing There goes your super-lean stack and we're back to square-one.
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  Not necessarily, because I didn't specify the tool. You can even use pure bash to generate it if you want.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  If you know what you want you could write a trivial script which just pushes a Markdown file through pandoc(unless you just write html), concatenates it with the files for the header and footer (& maybe an inlined stylesheet) and appends a link to the index file. The result will be the same but applying changes on all pages is a matter of seconds. Nothing against a lightweight stack, but simplicity doesn't necessarily have to exclude functionality.
  - gerikson 6y ago
    This was essentially my first blog.
rchaud 6y ago
He mentions that SSGs require tooling and dependencies. And if all you need are dynamic headers and footers, just wrap those in 'php include' tags and rename the files to .php. It's still HTML and CSS that's getting rendered.
- indigodaddy 6y ago
  I’m not a web guy—- this should be safe from php vulnerabilities I would think, because there is no db and it’s just taking advantage of very limited/basic features of php right?
  - tommyage 6y ago
    Php vulnerabilities are introduced by the developer.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    The number of vulnerabilities is vastly reduced due to the static nature of the site. You aren't buying anything on it, or inputting other kinds of data that needs to be written to a database. It may as well be a read-only site.
- z3t4 6y ago
  I've used both server side rendering and server side includes. A static site generator beats both. Just have a listener that will re-generate the site live when you write new content, then just ssh/ftp the generated content to the server when you are done, or if you are fancy you can use version control and push to a repo with a CI toolchain that will regenerate and ssh/ftp it for you.

steren 6y ago

My article covers that: > So... if I don’t use any templating system, how do I update my header, footer or nav? Well, simply by using the ”Replace in files” feature of any good text editor. They don’t need frequent updates anyway. The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires.

Hitton 6y ago
>The benefits of using a templating system is not worth the cost of introducing the tooling it requires. Other people use static site generation, you use search and replace in your editor - not much of difference. Your approach is slower in long term, but with your on average 1 article per year it will take some time until you reach the threshold.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Eh, I don't think a person can ever write enough articles and rewrite their layout enough times that search+replace overhead ends up bigger than the upfront time it takes to read jekyll/hugo/whatever docs (plus debugging idiosyncrasies, etc). And even if search and replace was slower overall, you might be looking at a difference of minutes over a period of decades (i.e. it wouldn't actually matter in any practical sense). Far too often I see people spend days to save 2 seconds (and then proceed to not realize the savings over a long enough timespan)
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    In reality the time saved isn't the only significant factor though, humans aren't machines after all. I'll gladly "waste" a bit more time if that time makes the process more enjoyable in the end.
andai 6y ago
You forgot to mention the main benefits! Your website does not fingerprint my device, nor present me with a dark pattern infested "do you want us to send your data to 50 ad networks" popup.

LeonenTheDK 6y ago

This is the exact thing I experienced and have been dealing with the past couple days. I wanted to create a small collection of pages as my website, intending to keep everything as small and simple as possible since it was (mostly) just to display some basic info and "posts". Well as soon as I wanted that menu for pages it was a whole new can of worms. Sure, I could just copy/paste/replace content as it changes. But I don't want to have to be doing that any time I decide I want to change or add something. And I'm known to be a source of human error. I ended up going Node+Express+EJS for the includes and certain more dynamic content on pages. It works well enough, page sizes are still small. Also considered some static site generators but at the time they seemed like overkill for what I wanted. Maybe there's a tool out there that will compile to plain old HTML files that I'm unaware of, I don't keep up much on front-end things.

mouzogu 6y ago
HTML, CSS and SSI includes would be an easier option. If you don't want to deal with Node.
- LeonenTheDK 6y ago
  I was unaware of SSI, thanks for pointing it out. I'll be taking a look at that tonight.
- robertoandred 6y ago
  How do you set the state of a nav with SSI? Does it know what the page being built is?
  - mouzogu 6y ago
    You can use variables in SSI and if/else conditions. So you could set state based on the URL or other environment variables. It's actually fairly powerful and you can get quite a lot done with it. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/ssi.html

Shared404 6y ago

> it's super easy when your page doesn't have even a header and/or a footer. It's not that hard even with. My stack consists of HTML/CSS, and a small program to stitch headers and footers onto documents generated with markdown. If anyone would like to see it, it should be in the Sourcehut page linked in my profile. The program is a hacky (but functional) piece of garbage however. E: Spelling

scooble 6y ago
I did this. Had a header template, a footer template and a bunch of pages. My build script was basically ‘for page in pages cat header page footer > ouput’. Worked fine for its purpose (which was limited in scope).
- Shared404 6y ago
  That's just about what mine does as well, except pages will inherit headers above them in the directory structure, so I could make the top bar pretty without JS.

eurasiantiger 6y ago

Just create the header/footer as static SVG, embed as <object>, let http/2 handle the rest.

waldir 6y ago
Interesting. Can you share an example of this working?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

onion2k 6y ago

Back in the old days of web development in 1999 there was a great app called Adobe Pagemill for making changes across thousands of HTML pages. It was great. These days you can do the same thing with about 5 lines of Python.

asddubs 6y ago

to cover slightly more use cases, you could go for <?php include "header.php"; ?> like it's 2002, and then have that file just be plain html also. Of course if you're gonna pitch a solution that's impractical in most cases, you might as well go for the most extreme variant of that solution and not bother with that

alpaca128 6y ago

> it saves time, and your time costs much more than hardware... And the user's time doesn't? If you can shave off a bit of loading/processing time for every request you will have improved the experience for countless people. Sure, using just HTML+CSS is a bit extreme, but for many sites the removal of some social media embeddings/trackers and switch to static site generation could improve it by an order of magnitude.