2016/Brighton/goingstatic

Going Static was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/goingstatic

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IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016 Session: Going Static

Description:

Participants

• petermolnar (leading)
• adactio

Notes

• interests and whys
  • longetivity
  • adactio want to combine database relation usage with longetivity
  • resiliency
  • option to use CDNs - geo-distribution
  • any end-user-friendly SaaS solution for static generators?
    • webfaction ?
  • security - there's nothing to hack
  • most personal sites receive infrequent updates; no need for always-on dynamicity

• webmentions for static sites
  • 3rd party or hosted "dynamic" part is necessary
    • receive webmentions
    • interact with other sites
  • potential hybrid solution:
    • on build, pull the existing mentions/comments
    • plus pull the not yet baked in ones via JS

• currently used sw
  • jekyll

• large binary content issue
  • static sites text can go into version control repositories, but pushing eg. photos is a problem
  • the text and the binary can be separated and upload with commit hooks, for example

• how do you transition from a dynamic site to a static content
  • Wordpress to Jekyll exporter: https://github.com/benbalter/wordpress-to-jekyll-exporter
  • spiders to go throught the site
    • generate transitions (static content) on the fly
    • try to lookup this intermediate static file and only go to the DB if this fails
    • once done, switch to complete static genetor?

• storage formats
  • Markdown
    • problems with raw Markdown documents:
      • not enough metadata
      • no relation storage
    • solutions:
      • frontmatter (YAML)
      • intermediate database with metadata
  • h-entry (HTML)
    • benefits of included metadata
  • aaronpk is using YAML version of the h-entry data as frontmatter in front of the content