Month: November 2018

Delivering a Web experience

A Fundamental Disconnect by Aaron Gustafson (aaron-gustafson.com)

The fundamental problem with viewing JavaScript as the new VM is that it creates the illusion of control. Sure, if we are building an internal Web app, we might be able to dictate the OS/browser combination for all of our users and lock down their machines to prevent them from modifying those settings, but that’s not the reality on the open Web.

 

The fact is that we can’t absolutely rely on the availability of any specific technology when it comes to delivering a Web experience. Instead, we must look at how we construct that experience and make smarter decisions about how we use specific technologies in order to take advantage of their benefits while simultaneously understanding that their availability is not guaranteed. This is why progressive enhancement is such a useful philosophy.

I miss the simple web that was run on HTML, minimal CSS and JavaScript.

Jekyll Build Time

I wonder what website build performance will be like when he gets to 4,000 posts. Slow build times are why I have ruled out converting my website to Jekyll or Hugo. I've got over 4,000 active posts (and many with images) on my 14-year-old website. I create about one to three new posts per day. I can't imagine writing a post, waiting several minutes for the website to build, and then copying the files over to a server each and every time.

He made a lot of customizations to make things work faster. If he changes themes at some point In the future, he’ll need to redo the customizations.

I think the challenge for static site generators is that they were designed to be used for sites that don’t change often; e.g. corporate web sites. In other words, ststaic content. But now we have people, trying to shoehorn it for use with sites that update more often; e.g. blogs. Hence, the need to hack together work arounds. It’s klugely.

Best to use a system designed for dynamic web sites that have frequently updated content: e.g blogs. Ghost, WordPress, etc. do that well.