Slides for talk on "Static Site Generators - Developing Websites in Low-resource Condition"

1. Paul Walk
Founder and Director, Antleaf
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
Web: http://www.paulwalk.net
Email: paul@paulwalk.net
www.antleaf.com www.dublincore.org
Static Site Generators - Developing
Websites in Low-resource Conditions

2. How to publish a
website... in 1999
Credit: Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

3. 1999: when life was simpler....

4. How to publish a
website... in 2009
Credit: Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

5. 2009: the rise of the CMS

6. One way (of many)
to publish a
website... in 2019
Credit: Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

7. 2019: easy websites for projects

8. What are Static Site
Generators?
Credit: Photo by Fatos Bytyqi on Unsplash

9. Three technologies which make the difference
1. Git
• stable, sophisticated, free version control technology which is ubiquitously
supported
• github: global scale infrastructure providing git as a service
• allowing distributed contributions by 'pull request’
2. Markdown
• simple, parseable but easily readable plain text format
3. Static Site Generators
• a new class of tool to manage content locally and compile it into webpages
which are then uploaded to a server (kinda like we used to do it in the early
90s!)

10. General characteristics
• a desktop application which assembles content from simple text files and
publishes it as static content to a bog-standard web-server.
• content is processed during the publishing operation, rather than when the
user requests content (although client-side Javascript still supported)
• simple command-line application to generate content and serve pages locally
(replaces the need for a staging server)
• no database - content in semi-structured text files

11. Components - standard to most systems
1. content-model
• folder hierarchy, text files
2. content pages
• (markdown, front-matter)
• blog type content is also often supported
3. templates (& themes)
• (with some level of basic scripting)
4. generator software
• typically a command-line script or application
5. configuration file
6. other non-core features
• 'shortcodes'
• data as content (i.e. data in structured files such as JSON or YAML)
• plugins

12. https://staticsitegenerators.net

13. Under the hood - a
case-study: the
Dublin Core website
and Hugo
Credit: Photo by Hosea Georgeson on Unsplash

14. About the Dublin Core Website
• in continuous operation
for ~25 years
• approx 2,500 web-pages
with 3,000 other files
• 18 month project to
convert to Markdown
• compiles with Hugo from
sources in < 2 seconds
• averages 100,000 page
views / month
• running on a web-server
costing $5 per month

15. About Hugo
• second most popular SSG
after Jekyll
• the fastest SSG (written in
Go)
• simple installation - just
download and run
(Windows, Mac, Linux etc)
• very actively developed -
improving all the time

16. Content-model
• text files arranged in folder
hierarchy
• folder hierarchy relates to URL
path structure
• filename relates to URL

17. Content pages
• "front-matter" metadata
• often in YAML format like here
• main body in Markdown, arbitrary
HTML also accepted where necessary

18. Templates
• can reference metadata (e.g. 'page
title') from content page
• can re-use 'partial' templates (e.g. a
common 'header' & 'footer')
• (example here is in Go's templating
syntax)

19. Command-line software
• used to generate new content:
• also used to run a local sever to see how the site will look

20. Deployment options
• SFTP
• Rsync (over SSH)
• git commit hooks (or
GitHub webhooks)
• requires the site
to be built on the
server, so a little
more
infrastructure
required

21. workflow

22. Why not just use
Wordpress?

23. Complexity, support, cost....

24. The sustainability headache
• ~50% of WP installations are at
least 3 versions behind the current,
at the time of checking this (2019-
06-25)
• to maintain a website, the software
has to be kept up-to-date (web
server, database software, PHP,
Wordpress, themes, plugins....)
• Funder now require project websites
to be sustained for longer periods
(10 years!)
• backup and long-term preservation
is very difficult
• typically need to preserve
complex software & a database
https://wordpress.org/about/stats/

25. The security nightmare
• WordPress is the most widely used
CMS in the world, powering over 25%
of websites with almost a 60% market
share of traffic.
• This attracts bad actors
• 14034 vulnerabilities (3129 uniques)
• 28 new ones added in the last month!
• a whole industry for protecting just
Wordpress!
https://wpvulndb.com
https://www.wordfence.com

26. So, why use a Static
Site Generator?
Credit: Photo by Fatos Bytyqi on Unspla

27. When to consider using a Static Site Generator
• if you need to build & manage a website which:
• will have one, or a small number, of users
• will be relatively simple
• won't have major 'dynamic' requirements
• will need to be preserved, even after it is no longer a live site
• a project website is a good candidate!

28. Simplifying curation and preservation
• version control and redundancy
• synchronised repositories & distributed version control via Git
• active curation
• ease of access and contribution to sources via Git
• simple & readable plain text formats (Markdown)
• "one click" deployment
• minimal deployment infrastructure
• standard web-server
• text files, open formats, no database or server-side 'logic', static site
generators
fewer broken websites!

29. Facing off: CMS
versus Static Site
Generator
Photo by Mariah Hewines on Unsplash

30. Summary: pros and cons
• Pros
• can manage many contributors,
with different levels of access
• (non-tech) user-friendly
authoring env.
• Cons
• significant sysadmin burden
• infrastructural reqs
• plugins make this worse
• content preservation challenge
• harder to scale
• challenging to keep secure
• Pros
• minimal infrastructural reqs
• minimal sysadmin burden
• easy to keep safe and secure
• supports content preservation
• very responsive websites
• scaling is not really an issue
• no need for staging server
• developer-friendly authoring env
• Cons
• basic access control (e.g. git repo)
• less user-friendly authoring env.
Content Management System Static Site Generator

31. peace of
mind!
Credit: Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

32. Paul Walk
Founder and Director, Antleaf
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
Web: http://www.paulwalk.net
Email: paul@paulwalk.net
www.antleaf.com www.dublincore.org
Thank you!