Static Site Generation Questions Blog
A short little temporary blog that’s a sounding board on what we can learn from static site generation as a possibility for libraries and cultural institution communcation teams.
August 2021
What’s in the box?
Because I’m running this instance on a Digital Ocean application, I can’t actually see any of the magic behind the screen. How does it know how to deal with dates? How would anything actually dynamic work, like listing the articles in the “blog”?
Maybe next up would be to create a version of this that runs on a LAMP stack and dig into the code.
Our library content management system (cms) has a LOT of dynamic content. But the ideas afforded in statics site generation (and Hugo as an example) help to mitigate some of those issues.
Hugo has short codes. We’ll have to explore how those could work on a live site, and if that gives hackers access to the same set of things like PHP might.
Static site generators could automatically update a static site at intervals, like hourly or daily.
I’m not sure, seems like a whole lot of moving parts, special skills, and the easy ability to accidentally wipe out your entire site. But it’s pretty cool once you have the setup, and if someone is technical and doesn’t mess with the setup too much maybe it would be a great solution.
Static sites sound great – there’s not any moving parts on the live site, and so there’s very little security worries.