Month: November 2018

The Downsides of a Static Site Generator

The Downsides of a Static Site Generator by Martyn Chamberlin (Drinking Caffeine)

Database-driven architectures are better than file-driven ones. Who knew?!

Although Martyn later changed his mind about switching to WordPress, from my experience, his points are valid.

The challenge I have with using a static site generator or daily blogging is the amount of time needed to create a new post.

I like to create posts with featured images and many of my posts have several images. My current workflow for WordPress is:

For static site generators, the workflow is.

  • Export images to a folder
  • Open terminal and navigate to the content folder
  • create a new post — don’t forget to add font matter for the date, post title, etc.
  • Insert text and images —more challenging since I have to copy paste path and name of specific images. Lots of back and forth between text editor and files system
  • save file
  • build the ENTIRE site -- wait. Wait some more.
  • move files to the production web server

I don’t want to do that for every blog post. Too much work. It’s friction that gets in the way of content creation.

If I want to, I can create a WordPress post directly from my iPhone while travelling using the WordPress app. Or from my iPad.

Because Jekyll and Hugo have not front end, the way to create a post from a mobile device with a static site generator is to string together a solution using GitHub and Dropbox and a bunch of other third-party services.

I think Static Site Generators are great for creating static websites. For example, a business, church or organization website that doesn’t update very often. I think they are the wrong solution for a blog.

The ESC key, iOS and the Apple Smart Keybaord

I have remote Linux servers that I want to manage. There are many apps in the App Store for doing this. I am using one of the top apps, Prompt. Prompt is a full functional terminal app supporting username/password logins as well as SSH key logins.

PasswordAuthentication no

PubkeyAuthentication yes

ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

I configured SSH on my Linux servers to disable password login for root and allow public key authentication only. I can access the Linux console from the Digital Ocean web front end (two-factor auth). I generate a public SSH key in Prompt and copy to clipboard.

I need to add the public SSH key for the iPad Pro to the .ssh/authorized_keys file. I access my Linux console in the DO web front end and open the authorize_keys files in Vim. I paste in the public key but ... neither the Apple Smart Keyboard, nor the default iOS keyboard have an escape key.

Prompt (and the many other terminal apps in the App Store) provide a virtual ESC key but I can’t use Prompt to access my servers until I add the iPad Pro SSH key to the server.

Argh!

It seems the only thing I can do is to enable password logins, login with Prompt, add the SSH key, then disable password logins.

I visited the Apple Support forums and poked around the web ... but I found more questions than answers.

The iPad Pro is marketed as being the iPad for professionals but I think this mostly applies to non-technical professionals.

  • Prompt 2.67

  • iOS 12.01

  • 10.5" iPad Pro