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> it's a static site and not using something like Rails

There's nothing "static" about this site. You're still querying a back-end database, you've just outsourced it to a third party. And looking at the example site, it doesn't exactly seem "simple" to me. Hell, instead of just using one (heroku) this one relies on TWO (netlify and the authors, takeshape).

This "stack" seems to be mainly being pushed by the people trying to sell the 3rd party backends.

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This approach absolutely does produce static web sites, just like any other static site generator. The querying of a back-end database doesn’t take place when a page gets loaded, it takes place when the static site is being built.

This article is just talking about one approach to taking one’s content and assembling it into a static website. The same basic workflow one should expect when dealing with any static site generator, the only difference being in the particulars of content aggregation and the build process.

Well, that's not entirely correct. The database querying only happens at build time. The output is just static HTML/js/CSS that can be hosted on any CDN (or anywhere else) relatively easy.

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