Static Website Envy – Interdependent Thoughts

This spring E took down her WordPress blog and replaced it with a static website. In the past weeks she did the same for her business website (and added her own sales channel to it, with just the payment provider as third party element).

Now I have static website envy. Until 2002 I had static websites, hand coded in a text editor. Still the easiest way for simple websites, I’m amazed to say. Then from 2003 I used a CMS for my blog, first Movable Type for about a decade and then WordPress from 2012 until today, and ran some Drupal based websites alongside it.

On many occasions using a CMS, I have thought about providing the actual web pages as static html. Because it is so very fast to load. And for most of this blog here, the only reason to have a CMS is back-end related. A CMS makes it easy to maintain consistency, create lists of posts or pages from whatever criteria, quickly change looks and lay-out, manage menu options, etc. All those dynamics mostly are aimed towards me, to make it easier to post something. But the same dynamics is then used to present a web page to you. Even if for almost anything on this site that is not needed, because the content itself is static. So why isn’t the site?

I’d rather cut the machinery to make a posting or site from the resulting posting and site. The machinery then can sit on my local device, and the results can live on a web server. It makes the website less vulnerable as well, not just faster.

That’s what static site generators mostly do, the machinery locally with the content in some repository, after which a script transforms it into static web pages and places them online.

Having seen E make this change, gives me static website envy.

There are some things to consider before starting a project like that. There are some interactive aspects of this site that I need to keep working. Sending and receiving Webmentions, and allowing comments for instance. On the back-end I want to be able to keep posting through micropub, so that like now I can post from within my feedreader or my local notes directly to my site.

3 reactions on “Static Website Envy”

Posting through micropub would be a thing to solve on the local machine, if you keep that distinction. I’ve idly thought about the subject myself, as well, being able to collate and write in SilverBullet, then Do A Thing and turn it into the basis of a post — basically just dumping the Markdown somewhere, with some frontmatter on top. Nothing concrete, yet.

As for webmentions, there’s several ways to tackle that, I’ve built my own in a single PHP script that gets called through Javascript — I’m afraid you can’t completely do without dynamic bits, here. There’s a simple RSS-renderer built in, so I can be notified of new mentions. For outgoing mentions, I use Pushl which gets called after the site (and, importantly, the RSS feed) are generated.

Assuming you want to keep those around, there’s solutions for comments, as well.

Reply

If you were static you couldn’t have cool comments like this!

Reply

Hi Matt, good to see you around here! Well yes, commenting is one of the things to solve. E opted for self-hosted isso comments.

Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply<br>Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *<br>Comment *<br>Name *

Email *

Website

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)

URL/Permalink of your article

I don’t track you here, but others might (due to embedded content)

This work is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International-license.

Subscribe to my blog

full article feed

Feedburner feed (Google tracking!)

comments feed

all reactions feed

See /feeds for more feeds

Blogs I subscribe to

OPML Blogroll, human and machine readable

Books I’ve read

books and subscriptions

OPML list of fiction 2021

Search for:

About

Blog Interdependent Thoughts maintained since 2002 by Ton Zijlstra.

European citizen in a networked world. Based in the Netherlands, living in Europe, working globally. There are no Others. There is just me and many of you.

I write about how our digital and networked world changes how we work, learn, decide and organize. I explore the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world.<br>I am passionate about increasing people's ability to act (knowledge), and their ability to change (learning). Key-words: open data, open government, fablabs, making, complexity, networked agency, networked learning, ethics by design.

Contacting me is easy and appreciated! I prefer e-mail.

blog@zylstra.org or...