Taking Gatsby for a spin | Hacker News Reader

Taking Gatsby for a spin

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57 pointsrbanffy19 comments

It's really nice seeing the traced SVG placeholder making it into the wild. It started as a visual demo using hand drawn SVGs in a Tweet [1]. Very quickly people were asking if it was hand drawn and I took the challenge to figure out to automate it [2]. What I really appreciate is the community adding value along the way. Someone else automated it in node, and others have added it to Gatsby and Webpack.

[1] https://twitter.com/mikaelainalem/status/918213244954861569

[2] https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/918772434370748416

Shameless plug: you can also use DatoCMS[1] with Gatsby, we just released an official plugin[2]!

[1]: https://www.datocms.com/

[2]: https://github.com/datocms/gatsby-datocms-source

My impression has always been that all sites generated using static generators are developer and documentation sites, with a few exceptions of sites that developers set up for other people.

Have static site generators penetrated anywhere outside of developers?

I've used https://www.metalsmith.io to make a few static sites for local events and small local businesses. It's really great for that type of thing but I am also a developer. I don't see static site generators gaining mass appeal unless they can be configured and published from a gui.

Exactly my concern as well. But then, there are projects like this that are starting to appear:

Netlify CMS | Open-Source Content Management System: https://www.netlifycms.org/

It seems also to me that Wordpress is still king.

There are several use cases for static sites that are not docs. It is true though, that the user base is more developer oriented. This is because we don't have this easy/rich "install a theme" for the static site world (yet).

When you want to have a custom, well performing and secure site with a server-side CMS that renders HTML you need developers, too. And you have to maintain the system constantly.

Static sites have low maintenance, are fast and don't need updates. These are things only developers care about. ;)

And with services like e.g. Contentful (disclaimer – I work for Contentful) you can edit the content in a familiar interface, rebuild your site immediately when content changes (via web hooks) and don't have to worry about any system updates or response times. And it doesn't feel static. ;)

The most famous example I can think of is https://www.smashingmagazine.com. You can find a few more here: https://jamstack.org/examples/

So I guess they will gain more and more popularity in the near future.

Do they have to be your average markdown template mass generators or do older "HTML helpers" that used e.g. m4, cpp or some ad hock template language count?

I think blosxom had a static output mode way back when.

(And regarding this one: Still not a fan of JSX, it's basically PHP/JSP all over again)

There are a few WordPress plugins to generate static sites, but I haven't heard much about them here on HN. I don't know if any are specifically intended to be easy to use by non-developers.

These plugins tend to die due to lack of maintenance.

Gatsby has a unique data system that let's you easily build static sites with WordPress/Drupal/other CMSes

* https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-source-wordpress/

* https://using-wordpress.gatsbyjs.org/

This doesn't pull the layout over, does it?

It looks like it can grab the content (including images) from the WordPress API which is nice.

Yeah exactly — it lets you grab content/data/images via the WordPress API.

Isn't "developers, and sites that developers set up for other people" ~all of the websites in the world?

No, hasn't been true for years now.

Putting aside sites like Wix, you can easily start a wordpress site these days in a few clicks.

I use Hugo for a blog. Works well, decent free themes available.

https://gohugo.io/

Ueno is a well known design agency in San Francisco, and the recently wrote about how they convince clients to use Contentful and Static over Wordpress: https://loremipsum.ueno.co/the-wordpress-question-355b4a2b75....

We're doing the exact same thing and have built quite a few sites to date: http://htmlcolorcodes.com/ https://wordcounter.io/

Gatsby is great. I have a site for a local construction company hosted on S3. The repo is on gitlab and I use the CI/CD of gitlab to handle deployments and tests. The best part, I trained the non-technical folks at the construction company to make edits on gitlab (change pictures, text, etc) and their changes automatically get deployed. Bacially using gitlab as the cms. It’s very smooth, no security issues, and very fast

Gatsbyjs has strengths but they disappear for mathematics heavy sites. There's no live reload for math Jax or katex

Maybe that could be addressed via a plugin and use of https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node on the backend. I spent the last month writing https://cocalc.com/share/, which generates mathematics-heavy user content 100% on the backend, using MathJax-node; it's definitely a bit painful, but seems to work reasonably well.

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