6 ms·

Static makes so much sense for sole-author sites with technical owners. Would be great to make the tech more accessible to those without the skills to recompil

Static makes so much sense for sole-author sites with technical owners. Would be great to make the tech more accessible to those without the skills to recompile and deploy. It's such a fast and affordable way to build websites, but existing tools like Hugo assume a lot from users that can put the tooling out of reach. (Enjoyed your write-up too. I wrote the original version of html-to-markdown that you used in your migration; it's great to see it's still useful.)

stn8188 3y ago
I agree completely with this thought. So many people jump right to a wordpress because it can be "easy" (and as an EE, even figuring out the details of Hugo was pretty confusing for what basically amounts to an evening hobby). When I first started putting together my website [0] I considered the tradeoff between static and "dynamic", but constrained myself to the former because I didn't want to pay extra for hosting costs. The Fastmail file/website hosting has been absolutely incredible for this purpose. All-in-all, doing a static site has allowed me to learn so much more about html and other basic web technology than I think I would have ever gotten from a Wordpress or similar site. The biggest downside thus far is that I wanted to start a sort of Wiki-style knowledge base for users to contribute in my particular niche, but of course the static aspect precludes any user editing. I use that area of my site as my own knowledge-base still, putting info there that I reference all the time at my day job. For fun the other night, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of adding Disqus comments too. I don't expect anyone to ever use them, but instead was just learning about how to do it. [0] The site is at https://ShieldDigitalDesign.com https://ShieldDigitalDesign.com if anyone is curious to see what a dumb EE can do with a Hugo-generated site hosted with Fastmail.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Hugo’s documentation site is poor. WordPress installation is a beast and involves getting PHP, Apache, and MySQL installed, which are each nontrivial. Hugo only seems more intimidating than WordPress because of the size of the documentation gap.
  - stn8188 3y ago
    Yeah, I'd agree with that. Even when just setting up the Disqus comments the other day I found the docs lacking. This would probably be less of an issue making Hugo config changes was something I did more than a couple of times per year.
nicbou 3y ago
I was just thinking about how much trouble it would be to onboard an employee. Markdown is not rocket science, but getting the SSG to run? Committing files? Oh boy. On the other hand, it's great for me, because I don't need to babysit a database or maintain hosted software. I can go on vacation and not worry about anything.
d13 3y ago
Adobe actually had a product like that about 20 years ago that the agency I worked with then used with their clients. Clients could just directly edit their content in a wysiwyg format, hit a publish button and it would upload. Can’t remember what it was called!
- modernerd 3y ago
  Perhaps it was Contribute? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Contribute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Contribute
aae42 3y ago
Products like [decap CMS](https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms) try to bridge that gap, but I agree that this space needs to be further developed. In fact I think there needs to be a bunch more work to allow mere mortals to use version control and branch workflows in day to day work.
- modernerd 3y ago
  Tina does a good job of making branching workflows more accessible with its recent editorial workflow features (backed by a GitHub repo and PR reviews): https://tina.io/blog/Introducing-Editorial-Workflow-Features-for-your-Team/ https://tina.io/blog/Introducing-Editorial-Workflow-Features... We need more like this that doesn't require a SaaS-backed "business or enterprise plan", though.
pembrook 3y ago
> Static makes so much sense for sole-author sites with technical owners. Totally agree for this narrow use case. But you're also correct that if you're a startup with a marketing site--going the Gatsby/Hugo/etc. route is a total disaster. Have seen so many technical founders make this mistake. What happens is you realize, crap, my team needs to publish content for SEO and build new landing pages...and they aren't able to do my esoteric Git + Hand coding + Markdown/Front Matter + build process steps. So then you get sold some convoluted "HEADLESS CMS," which claims to solve your problems, but is actually a total freaking nightmare to setup and maintain (god forbid you ever want to change anything). Have witnessed this charade more times than I can count. Seriously, just use Webflow. I know HN is highly disgusted by the idea of something being marketed as a "no-code" tool. But Webflow basically is a static site generator + headless CMS, just with a UI layer for non-technical folks. When you click publish on updates to a Webflow site you're basically automating the recompile and deploy steps.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  I’ve been running a news site with Hugo for the last four years. You setup a CMS that lets the non-technical people make content changes without you. For design changes, you always are going to need someone who knows how to code, so it’s not a big deal to use Hugo. Of all the problems we’ve had running a website, Hugo has not been one of them.
- chrisldgk 3y ago
  Webflow has some huge constraints when you’re trying to actually build a good marketing page. Try framer instead, the fact that you can rely on React for anything that’s not possible to do in the visual editor is a life saver and actually enables you to build sites that are on-par with traditional headless CMS plus meta framework stacks while still being just as easy (if not easier) to maintain by non-technical users. The only problem is the price-tag which means you’ll be outpriced for small personal projects but it’s still a good deal for startups and bigger companies.
  - pembrook 3y ago
    I'm surprised you'd say Webflow has the constraints vs. Framer. Framer definitely seems promising but is way too limited and basic at the moment. They don't even have an API, and the CMS just feels super sandboxed. Good luck doing any of the programmatic SEO stuff you can do with Webflow. I'm confident they'll get there in a few years though.
rpdillon 3y ago
I haven't used it, but Publii[0] might be along the lines of what you're thinking of. I ran across it in a previous HN discussion, and it seems to be static site generator with a pretty user-friendly graphical interface. [0]: https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- BryanLegend 3y ago
  I've been thrilled with Publii. So happy to be rid of WP. I use it to run https://legendstudio.com/ https://legendstudio.com/
chiefalchemist 3y ago
There are a couple of companies/hosts - the names escape me, sorry - that do WordPress to static. That's at least fairly accessible to all/most.
csense 3y ago
> Would be great to make the tech more accessible to those without the skills to recompile and deploy Originally, hand-writing HTML was a supposed-to-be-accessible-to-non-technical-users way to make a website. Until the late 1990's, HTML was used sort of like Markdown is used today.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  And then there was Wikitext. Wikipedia only recently perfected their Visual Editor in a way that made me feel comfortable using it, but it's still a situational decision whether I use VE or edit the source directly. And at $dayjob I am accustomed to poring over raw MarkDown, due to lack of a viable WYSIWYG application.
- smashed 3y ago
  And people could not resist the urge to add styling and heterogeneous layouts all over. Weird typography, layouts, alignments and extra padding here and there. A secret reason why I like to push markdown workflows is that you can't deviate from the site's overall look and feel. Focus on your content, hit publish and it will look good. Even if we change the site's look down the road, the content is still going to be fine.
  - evandale 3y ago
    I miss all that weird styling :( It gave the internet character and flaws. Now it feels like everyone limits themselves to publishing nothing but perfect images of themselves.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      <marquee> tag is awesome and noone can tell me otherwise.
      - evandale 3y ago
        Thanks for the warning, I won't try to tell you otherwise hahaha! Besides, if you like marquees who am I to say you're wrong!? I have exactly 0 design or taste bones in my body and think lime green text on a blue background is the pinnacle of human beauty.

stn8188 3y ago

I agree completely with this thought. So many people jump right to a wordpress because it can be "easy" (and as an EE, even figuring out the details of Hugo was pretty confusing for what basically amounts to an evening hobby). When I first started putting together my website [0] I considered the tradeoff between static and "dynamic", but constrained myself to the former because I didn't want to pay extra for hosting costs. The Fastmail file/website hosting has been absolutely incredible for this purpose. All-in-all, doing a static site has allowed me to learn so much more about html and other basic web technology than I think I would have ever gotten from a Wordpress or similar site. The biggest downside thus far is that I wanted to start a sort of Wiki-style knowledge base for users to contribute in my particular niche, but of course the static aspect precludes any user editing. I use that area of my site as my own knowledge-base still, putting info there that I reference all the time at my day job. For fun the other night, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of adding Disqus comments too. I don't expect anyone to ever use them, but instead was just learning about how to do it. [0] The site is at https://ShieldDigitalDesign.com https://ShieldDigitalDesign.com if anyone is curious to see what a dumb EE can do with a Hugo-generated site hosted with Fastmail.

earthboundkid 3y ago
Hugo’s documentation site is poor. WordPress installation is a beast and involves getting PHP, Apache, and MySQL installed, which are each nontrivial. Hugo only seems more intimidating than WordPress because of the size of the documentation gap.
- stn8188 3y ago
  Yeah, I'd agree with that. Even when just setting up the Disqus comments the other day I found the docs lacking. This would probably be less of an issue making Hugo config changes was something I did more than a couple of times per year.

nicbou 3y ago

I was just thinking about how much trouble it would be to onboard an employee. Markdown is not rocket science, but getting the SSG to run? Committing files? Oh boy. On the other hand, it's great for me, because I don't need to babysit a database or maintain hosted software. I can go on vacation and not worry about anything.

d13 3y ago

Adobe actually had a product like that about 20 years ago that the agency I worked with then used with their clients. Clients could just directly edit their content in a wysiwyg format, hit a publish button and it would upload. Can’t remember what it was called!

modernerd 3y ago
Perhaps it was Contribute? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Contribute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Contribute

aae42 3y ago

Products like [decap CMS](https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms) try to bridge that gap, but I agree that this space needs to be further developed. In fact I think there needs to be a bunch more work to allow mere mortals to use version control and branch workflows in day to day work.

modernerd 3y ago
Tina does a good job of making branching workflows more accessible with its recent editorial workflow features (backed by a GitHub repo and PR reviews): https://tina.io/blog/Introducing-Editorial-Workflow-Features-for-your-Team/ https://tina.io/blog/Introducing-Editorial-Workflow-Features... We need more like this that doesn't require a SaaS-backed "business or enterprise plan", though.

pembrook 3y ago

> Static makes so much sense for sole-author sites with technical owners. Totally agree for this narrow use case. But you're also correct that if you're a startup with a marketing site--going the Gatsby/Hugo/etc. route is a total disaster. Have seen so many technical founders make this mistake. What happens is you realize, crap, my team needs to publish content for SEO and build new landing pages...and they aren't able to do my esoteric Git + Hand coding + Markdown/Front Matter + build process steps. So then you get sold some convoluted "HEADLESS CMS," which claims to solve your problems, but is actually a total freaking nightmare to setup and maintain (god forbid you ever want to change anything). Have witnessed this charade more times than I can count. Seriously, just use Webflow. I know HN is highly disgusted by the idea of something being marketed as a "no-code" tool. But Webflow basically is a static site generator + headless CMS, just with a UI layer for non-technical folks. When you click publish on updates to a Webflow site you're basically automating the recompile and deploy steps.

earthboundkid 3y ago
I’ve been running a news site with Hugo for the last four years. You setup a CMS that lets the non-technical people make content changes without you. For design changes, you always are going to need someone who knows how to code, so it’s not a big deal to use Hugo. Of all the problems we’ve had running a website, Hugo has not been one of them.
chrisldgk 3y ago
Webflow has some huge constraints when you’re trying to actually build a good marketing page. Try framer instead, the fact that you can rely on React for anything that’s not possible to do in the visual editor is a life saver and actually enables you to build sites that are on-par with traditional headless CMS plus meta framework stacks while still being just as easy (if not easier) to maintain by non-technical users. The only problem is the price-tag which means you’ll be outpriced for small personal projects but it’s still a good deal for startups and bigger companies.
- pembrook 3y ago
  I'm surprised you'd say Webflow has the constraints vs. Framer. Framer definitely seems promising but is way too limited and basic at the moment. They don't even have an API, and the CMS just feels super sandboxed. Good luck doing any of the programmatic SEO stuff you can do with Webflow. I'm confident they'll get there in a few years though.

rpdillon 3y ago

I haven't used it, but Publii[0] might be along the lines of what you're thinking of. I ran across it in a previous HN discussion, and it seems to be static site generator with a pretty user-friendly graphical interface. [0]: https://getpublii.com/ https://getpublii.com/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BryanLegend 3y ago
I've been thrilled with Publii. So happy to be rid of WP. I use it to run https://legendstudio.com/ https://legendstudio.com/

chiefalchemist 3y ago

There are a couple of companies/hosts - the names escape me, sorry - that do WordPress to static. That's at least fairly accessible to all/most.

csense 3y ago

> Would be great to make the tech more accessible to those without the skills to recompile and deploy Originally, hand-writing HTML was a supposed-to-be-accessible-to-non-technical-users way to make a website. Until the late 1990's, HTML was used sort of like Markdown is used today.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
And then there was Wikitext. Wikipedia only recently perfected their Visual Editor in a way that made me feel comfortable using it, but it's still a situational decision whether I use VE or edit the source directly. And at $dayjob I am accustomed to poring over raw MarkDown, due to lack of a viable WYSIWYG application.
smashed 3y ago
And people could not resist the urge to add styling and heterogeneous layouts all over. Weird typography, layouts, alignments and extra padding here and there. A secret reason why I like to push markdown workflows is that you can't deviate from the site's overall look and feel. Focus on your content, hit publish and it will look good. Even if we change the site's look down the road, the content is still going to be fine.
- evandale 3y ago
  I miss all that weird styling :( It gave the internet character and flaws. Now it feels like everyone limits themselves to publishing nothing but perfect images of themselves.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    <marquee> tag is awesome and noone can tell me otherwise.
    - evandale 3y ago
      Thanks for the warning, I won't try to tell you otherwise hahaha! Besides, if you like marquees who am I to say you're wrong!? I have exactly 0 design or taste bones in my body and think lime green text on a blue background is the pinnacle of human beauty.