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Comment by tbrock | Hacker News Reader

Holy cow. Is this an improvement? Remember in 1999 when you could get a static website up in 3 minutes using ftp?

It's actually a good* guide, but the wording of the title seems to me to imply that this is a simple process. It's dizzying complex.

* by "good", I mean the following:

- prose is engaging

- very comprehensive, no hidden steps missed

- covers a lot of things that while not strictly necessary, will make an experienced git user's website updating workflow much easier in the long run

- covers some small details that are new to me that look nice

It's very much complexity up front in exchange for automated ease later though.

I agree.

From the outset it is version controlled, CDN'd, available over HTTPS, and would withstand being linked from the front page of HN just fine.

It's not just a static site, it's one that is easy to grow and modify, and that can withstand a lot of traffic immediately with no investment in infrastructure for the author.

(evidenced by the fact that it is withstanding a HN front page set of traffic)

Yes, comparing this to throwing up a barebones page at www.somewhere.edu/~username/index.html is apples and oranges.

Hmm, I found lots of proofreading material.

I made my first website using vi to make an index.html file in the ~/public_html directory in the home directory of my account on a university Solaris server back in 1997. FTP was a luxury.

Kids today.

On my university, you do the same thing to get a website up. (Except the web server is actually a different server than the main server, so you have to ssh there, and you replace vi with vim and Solaris with Linux.)

Can we avoid the ageism?

It's called humorous nostalgia. You must be young if you're so easily offended.

Can we avoid the ageism?

It's called sarcasm. You must be old if you don't get it.

Can we avoid the ageism?

That is not the quality content this site provides.

You must be a racist if you can't see that.

If you can't contribute, leave.

You could make a website with vi and host it on Solaris today if you felt like it. I'm not sure why would want to though. Things have improved.

Now I use vim.

Yes, we do have better tools than vi now: Emacs comes to mind.

Obligatory xkcd :)

https://xkcd.com/378/

FTP? You kids had it easy.

We routed console direct to disk in PR1MOS, and if you made a mistake, you had to start all over. But you never knew if you made a mistake until it was done because you couldn't see the output as you typed.

Of course, you didn't end up with a web site, but the result was globally networked. As long as you didn't mind that e-mail took several days to get across the country and a week to go from Illinois to Sweden.

/!killer!jolnet... /Bang paths FTW!

This is how I remember website development. Those were extremely fun and exciting times. 1997 was my freshman year of high school. Geocities and Anglefire FTW.

And you could do it with a WYSIWYG editor which would output reasonable markup. (dreamweaver)

Or more popular, you could do it with a horrible WYSWIG editor which output garbage (Frontpage express).

I would beg to upgrade to Frontpage express over the current domain-specific WYSIWYG I'm using day to day right now.

Beg

Dreamweaver still generated garbage, though not nearly as bad as Front-page.

I remember getting pissed at DW making 600kb files, but hand-rolling it brought it down to ~200kb.

Ah, life on dial-up, when those bytes mattered.

The trickery is in the use of the words "static site" which has become a buzzword (buzzphrase? buzzwords?)for sites generated using a "static site" generator or tool, in this case Hugo is used. The rest of the process is considered the "building" part of a "static site" even though to those of us making sites just a few years ago static site meant open up notepad and write some HTML to push somewhere, that or Freewebs to others (or webs as it is now).

I solved this problem a long time ago. Once solved, it did not take three hours to get a web side on-line (well may be, if you bought your own domain and set up your own server to host it).

https://www.jgaa.com/content/1/old_sites/july_2000/htmgen32....

That's how we do it in 2017. Want to handle an on-click? You need dozens of NPM modules and webpack. Look at Docker's cowsay "hello world" example - it has to satisfy several (dozens?) of perl dependencies just to render ASCII art.

What does Docker have to do with cowsay? Docker does not develop or maintain the cowsay utility [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay

You're right - I was actually thinking about their variation of cowsay that they include in a lot of their training, whalesay:

https://hub.docker.com/r/docker/whalesay/

This image installs the cowsay utility and then adds its own "cow" file. This is the default installation of the cowsay utility, not something created by Docker. This is clear from reading the Dockerfile on that page:

# install cowsay, and move the "default.cow" out of the way so we can overwrite it with "docker.cow"

Just wait until they find out about caching then we'll have dynamic static site generators.

Using Hugo adds a lot of complexity. I'm using Surge.sh and raw html/css, I can have a site up in under 2 minutes. I think I spent less than an hour on my blog (it has a very simple layout).

What does it look like/is it customizable? I've been looking to host a math/CS blog somewhere outside of Tumblr (which is great for getting an audience and interacting with people, but totally useless for actually being able to write math, unless you want to embed JPEGs everywhere) and make it as simple as possible.

This article seemed like a good start, but I'd love to know more about how you built your blog in a way that's easily maintainable.

I'll PM you a link to my blog if you send an email to rug3y@teknik.io. It's still a work in progress but I think it looks alright. If you decide you want to do something similar, I can help you do what I've done.

Awesome, thank you!

You can still do that. Nobody bothers, though. Knowing how to write your own HTML, CSS and Javascript is starting to feel like knowing how to carve your own canoe.

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