Back again with another exciting post about this fun and ever changing field of software development. As I have mentioned before I moved this blog a while back from the Hugo to the Hexo static site generator. One thing I did notice though regardless of either is that a static site might not be the best way to do a blog. When you add a post and then update it the way it works in both generators is every page and a few other files need to be uploaded again. Why? Look on the right. There is a sidebar with indexed list of posts. Every page needs to updated that has that sidebar.
Years ago my main product site was served using PHP. Now that seems like that might be a good idea again though actually a static site for app products should work just fine, just do away with the sidebar. My current temporary site just as a few HTML files and very little will change. A bigger site with all the “bells and whistles” is a little more complicated.
Thing is with a blog using PHP I just had empty HTML files that would display the latest php file for content. Very easy to update and takes little time. A sidebar for a blog would be the same thing as it would only need to grab the latest php sidebar file. What I need to do is make an app to maintain and automate much of such a site. We’ll see what happens.
Now that said there are dynamic page generators. Most work on Node.js and often using React. Fine but you’ll need a CDN to serve those pages which is something most individual or small developers can afford. The usual suspects (web hosts) don’t have those.
The reason my main site broke was because I updated my Linux machine and a library that Hugo uses seems to still be broken on Linux. I also tried taking the site over to Windows and running the latest Hugo there but that didn’t work either. Much of the problem was that they changed a lot of how the scripts and templates worked not only to my chagrin but a lot of other folks as well.
Such is fun and games in the field of software development.