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Static sites are a PITA when you need to add certain functionality. It's an optimization. Why start with such a crazy optimization when you can just put cloudfl
by winrid 3y ago
Static sites are a PITA when you need to add certain functionality. It's an optimization. Why start with such a crazy optimization when you can just put cloudflare etc in front of it?
Source: the fastcomments docs, blog, and several of my sites are SSG. I don't like it anymore.
- cxr 3y agoWeird to see the notion of taking the documents you want to publish and saving them as documents be called "crazy". Publishing a blog post is just document preparation—you know, desktop publishing. I'd call the let's-insert-an-unnecessary-database-here outlook the crazy thing. Not to mention, basically a violation of the Principle of Least Power <https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP>.
- winrid 3y agoBecause that's not what a blog or documentation site is. They usually have a ton of other features. sorting, searching, embedded dynamic widgets, code snippets, maybe code snippets pulls users account id and prefills it, and so on...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cxr 3y ago> Because that's not what a blog or documentation site is. K. Ignoring that... None of those are prerequisites. They're not listed by the author of the post linked here as among the features that he considers "essential for a blog in 2023" (nor are they even present on the Datasette Cloud blog that is the subject of the post), and it's not a "crazy optimization" to not go out of your way to introduce them. (Is he, in your view, not actually running a blog?)
- winrid 3y agoIt is a crazy optimization. I cannot be convinced otherwise at this point. Static sites sound nice and clean to a junior dev, I get it. But after using that approach for years I'll never do it again. Too much of a pain as things grow. Build step can also get slow. Django is so easy to use and extend. You can use it with sqlite, no DB to run. Wikipedia is a nice example. Could that be SSG. Yes. Is it, and should it be? No. If your site has more traffic than Wikipedia let me know. Do you know how much support calls I have to field for fastcomments with people trying to integrate into SSG systems with SSO or whatever that would be simple with SSR etc? A lot.
- cxr 3y ago> Wikipedia is a nice example. Could that be SSG. Yes. Is it, and should it be? No, Wikipedia is a terrible example. Absurd, even. We're talking about blogs. We can stick to that example. We don't need to reach for bad ones.
- winrid 3y agoYeah? It's a bunch of documents that link to each other :) blogs do the same.
- cxr 3y agoWikipedia is a wiki. Blogs are not wikis. Blogs do not require a wiki engine. Wikis do. The statement "Wikipedia is a nice example" remains an abomination.
- winrid 3y agoI am thinking of documentation sites and blogs in the same categories, because I use them similarly. I create blog posts (documents), they have titles, categories, and they link to each other. I'm being a bit dramatic, but it's to stop people from using SSG. I don't like working on said applications because adding every little feature is a pain and adds to the build time. Running a simple service and DB is easy - I've been doing it for a decade. I ran blogs and sites with databases when I was in HS - surely big companies can do it and put cloudflare in front of it.
- rcarmo 3y agoI switched from a dynamic to a static site even with Cloudflare in front because I didn’t want to have any active endpoints, period. Much less hassle and worry, plus the hosting costs decrease by an order of magnitude (just dump HTML into a storage bucket, zero VMs).