🐫Static Site

Static site is a website that has all of the content pre-generated and hosted on the server, i/e not a dynamic site. This is a dichotomy.

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Static sites are especially popular for making your own personal websites. People usually use a static site generator (SSG for short) that turns a collection of pre-processed files (usually, a folder of Markdown files) and turns them into a published form (a folder of HTML files), which is then served by a hosting or a server.

This is a great technology for many cases, but I find it unusable for the most popular cause: personal website. Take a personal wiki, such as mine. You'd need to do the following to publish a change:

  1. Edit the source document.

    • If you are on a phone, you are unlikely to be able to do so.

  2. Run the generator.

  3. Publish.

Sometimes, there are less or more steps. Anyway, it's not just clicking some buttons on a website. It's a whole process! I used to maintain a static website: https://bouncepaw.github.io. It was a pain to edit it! There are still some pending changes. Also, take git into consideration, which is used together with SSG 95 % of cases.

When I added a deprecation notice to the site, GitHub took 2 minutes and 8 seconds to publish it. Here, take a look at the deployment job. The long time is probably related to the fact the artifact weighs 141 MB.

For comparison, Melanocarpa's repository weighs ~48 MB as of 2022-06-21. It includes the whole history of every hypha. In rendered, HTML form, it would take at least twice that. Okay, whatever, my private wiki Cyberrachel's repo weighs 588 MB. Both on Melanocarpa and Cyberrachel, edits are instantaneous. Mycorrhiza binary itself weighs a ten of MB too, which is required for running these wikis.

With a dynamic site, I just make the changes without thinking about it. Afterwards, I edit from any device just as easily.

Git, Markdown, and a ridiculous SSG. This is the stack of a modern blog.

Oh, the love for static sites has also corrupted the meaning of the word wiki. There are many static sites that call themselves wikis. There is nothing wiki about them. They are usually digital gardens, which is a great thing, but they are not wikis.

Kawipiko

Ciprian Craciun has pointed out that servers are not fine-tuned for hosting static-only content, so he implemented a server which is.

kawipiko is a lightweight static HTTP server written in Go; focused on serving static content as fast and efficient as possible, with the lowest latency, and with the lowest resource consumption (either CPU, RAM, IO); supporting both HTTP/1 (with or without TLS), HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (over QUIC); available as a single statically linked executable without any other dependencies.

If you ever find yourself hosting a static site, consider using it.

Lists

absolutely +1 this. I've been "making my static site generator" for so long LoL, I still don't have a website. Also, I think that in the process of making the site by hand, it'll become much clearer what is that I really need from it