I was googling about static site generators and I found this article and thought I would share:
At StaticGen, our open-source directory of **static website generators**, we’ve kept track of more than a hundred generators for more than a year now, and we’ve seen both the volume and popularity of these projects take off incredibly on GitHub...
When Tim Berners-Lee launched the first website of the World Wide Web, a browser was a simple document viewer that could display hypertext, links and little else.
Today, we’re finally in the process of burying the last browser that has been holding the web back (RIP Internet Explorer 8). The modern browser is an operating system in its own right, no longer merely displaying documents downloaded from the web, but capable of running full-fledged web applications, making external calls to any CORS-compatible API, storing data locally, opening WebSockets to streaming servers, and even handling peer-to-peer connections to other browsers via WebRTC.
With the maturation of browsers, many features that used to require dynamic code running on a server can be moved entirely to the client. Want comments on your website? Add Disqus, Isso or Facebook comments. Want social integration? Add Twitter or Facebook’s JavaScript widget to your website. Want real-time data updating live on your website? Add a squirt of Firebase. Want search? Add Swiftype. Want to add live chat support? Olark is there. Heck, you can even add an entire store to a static website with Snipcart.
The list goes on and on, as a whole ecosystem of purely browser-based add-ons to websites is emerging. Apart from that, modern web apps built with Ember.js, AngularJS or React are often deployed entirely as static websites and served directly from a CDN with a pure API back end that’s shared between the website’s UI and the mobile client.
The biggest missing piece of the puzzle, however, is content editing. While working directly in Markdown in a text editor and pushing to GitHub is close to the ideal workflow for a front-end developer, it’s not something you’d get normal, non-technical end user to participate in.
Because of this, many websites built with static website generators currently end up being migrated to a dynamic CMS. There’s a huge need to bridge the gap between content editors and static website generation. Before that happens, static website generation will be reserved for a relatively small subset of today’s websites.
I think safe net may actually be riding the crest of this client side revolution. Calling these sites static is misleading - the core content may be static, but the client interacts with it in a very dynamic way.
Safe net also provides an easy way to publish changes to these sort of sites. No need to mess about with ftp or other more exotic solutions - you can just put directly to your site via the API through the launcher.
Edit: Also note that safe net itself is a giant CDN by design. You get this out of the box, for free!
P.s. sent from phone, so forgive formatting.
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