The joy and pain of using a static site generator for private and client work | Hacker News Reader

The joy and pain of using a static site generator for private and client work

screamingatmyscreen.com

Wow, this describes something quite close to something that I'm working on (and covers a number of problems that we've faced).

That said, all of the issues listed, while intractable, aren't impossible to deal with. CORS is just one way of handing things like forms submissions. Site regeneration can be done transparently from a centralised always-on server. There's no reason oldschool IE can't be made to work.

Indeed unfortunately the author's solution seems to miss a bunch of the benefits of having things static.

There's a lot of value in not doing work (or minimizing the amount of work done) when people come to read your page, and I'm honestly pretty surprised that there aren't more intelligent baked site generators out there.

Author here :) You are right that it is possible to deal with them. I never said it isn't possible that an old IE can work, it is just more work and sometimes a bit messy. As I mentioned I am aware that there is the approach regenerating the site on a server but I'm not sold on it.

I didn't want to discuss static site generators again, so I only went with the two major advantages. What did I miss? Easy setup / deployment is IMHO implicit as well as the fact that basically nothing on the server can break.

I think adoption and development in this direction isn't as attractive for most people. Initially you lose some comfort till you have a system around your site supporting it and than you still face the fact that only a handful people are willing to use your tool till you add a webinterface and other things which are expected to be included in mainstream solutions.

I think there are some quite popular and intelligent static site generators, they are just not called this way. Wordpress with Supercache or flask-frozen e.x.

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