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Comment by thieving_magpie | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this isn't the correct place to ask a question like this but how do you avoid interacting with a database or user accounts? Is it at simple as you don't have any of that in your application?

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You can set up a good bit of those sorts of complex interactions via webhooks. For instance, here's a good tutorial on setting up a comment system[0]. It's also how the forestry.io[1] CMS works.

However, building out a user account system this way is probably theroetically doable, but definitely not practical.

[0] https://css-tricks.com/jamstack-comments/

[1] https://forestry.io/docs/welcome/

Mostly that. If you take out all of the "social" aspects of most modern websites. Then they really don't require backend databases and accounts. I've been moving back to more of a minimalist/purist approach.

Static sites are great for simplicity, but IMO we should be striving for more interaction not less. If I open a blog I want to be able to host comments and not rely on email or third party services.

Maybe we need a hybrid site generator. We could still write the content as seperate text files, but we would have the ability to integrate comment sections, user profiles etc. seemlessly.

Our posts could be parsed and recorded onto a database, for better indexing, search, analytics and reducing redundancies.

The generator would come with a web server and handle everything we throw at it. From ssl to comments to databases.

That's the future I dream of. Not full blown CMSs, but not web 1.0 either.

A lot of people are doing these things already!

The Forestry.io blog has a number of articles covering some of these topics:

* eCommerce – https://forestry.io/blog/snipcart-brings-ecommerce-static-si...

* Search – https://forestry.io/blog/search-with-algolia-in-hugo/

* Forms – https://forestry.io/blog/5-ways-to-handle-forms-on-your-stat...

* Advanced Image Handling: https://forestry.io/blog/master-image-delivery-with-cloudina...

* Building APIs – https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/

Regarding user profiles, the Forestry website itself is built with Hugo and has a Rails app to handle profiles.

EDIT

I know you don't want to rely on third party services, but if it's possible to handle this with third party services then surely open source alternatives could be built.

Sounds great, but comments are the first thing I'd prefer just disappear from the internet. I understand that is what brings users, but they are generally cess pools of assholes and spammers.

I agree. Comment sections tend to be really hard to moderate. I accept comments via email and then I manually add them to articles as part of the main text. This is a largely self-moderating system because only when a reader honesly thinks their comment is important do they bother emailing. While I always respond, I only include the comment in the article if I think it is of greater value to the community at large.

It's not ideal, but it is as close as I have come to showing someone an article and asking for their comments IRL.

That's a massive amount of work though. Is there nothing to come from all of this "machine learning" nonsense talk, putting it to actual good use automating this?

It's probably not that hard to build something like that yourself. I remember my first project on Github back when I thought web development was PHP and nothing else was something that felt like a static site generator (all my articles were hand written XML pages with markdown blocks) but would generate blog indexes etc (including its own comment section) by parsing the XML and rendering them to "components" (basically php pages that handled content and arguments and returned HTML). It also had a super simple caching bit (like most forums/blogs do anyway) so it was almost static I guess.

Thank you for curing my curiosity.

Netlify has a paid product that will work if you want to paywall some content, if that's what you're asking.[1] Not interacting with a database is sort of the point for a static website.

[1] https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/static-site-behind-login/10100

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