Hacker News Reader

Comment by encomiast | Hacker News Reader

It seems like we've spent the past 25 years trying to solve the big headache this creates: you have 100 blog posts, which means 100 html files. Any structural change you need to make to the site involves touching all 100 files. CSS came along and helped separate the presentation from the information a bit, but it still sucked to maintain 100 html files on the server.

View on HN

I generally just have a makefile that for each page does `cat header.html page.html footer.html > out/page.html`. I realize this can be considered a "static site generator" but I think simple concatenation covers most of the painpoints of writing static sites manually, without introducing intermediate formats and complex processing.

Another option is PHP, which was practically made for the purpose of generating HTML. You can run it on your pages to generate static versions, and just use "include" directives with that.

Or "server side includes".

You're right but in my experience the annoyance factor jumps up as soon as you start wanting an RSS feed.

I wonder if you can have a snippet for that (can be a script that generate the code for one item) It’s not like such blog is updated thrice a day!

I sometimes go down this rabbit hole and wonder why people don't use server-side includes to just have Apache or nginx handle a common header / footer or whatnot. Seems like what they were made for. Are they slow or something?

They're instant and they work great. PHP includes also.

Isn't this what Jekyll solves?

Posts are all written as markdown, styling and layout are centralised with layout HTML pages and CSS.

I believe indexes can be auto-updated via post metadata.

And it's all static pages once generated, so there's no dynamic load on a database.

There are static site generators. There are even plugins that turn Wordpress and Drupal into static site generators, such that you do not need to edit the files one at a time to make changes.

PHP is perfectly sufficient here. Add a static cache if the overhead gets too much.

Client-side includes are easily done in a custom web component now. I use one. You can write a simple one in about 60 lines of JS.

If all you need is include functionality, then that's the way to go for static file hosting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com