What is this fascination with static sites then eh?!?
In the beginning... yes the benniging, ah the binginniging....
...Actually there was the thought that using a generator that skipped the complexity of themes and templates and moustaches and handlebars and whatnot, one may simplify publishing content. Especially if the content was authored in markdown.
So I stumbled across the Single Page Markdown Website, which works like a charm! However, the fact remains that images (to make the content visually appealing) is a bit of a bother with markdown. Of course, I did not want to spend any money on those fancy tools that do the heavy lifting for you. And if spending money was on the agenda, then why not host a Ghost?
Speaking of Ghosts, that is a really nifty little (not so little, but compared to WP, positively tiny) thing. Lightweight, moderated, content focused, everything one could want. But the challenge is of course the point about not wanting to spend money hosting stuff, or even administering landscapes.
In comparison Hugo (much touted), Gatsby, Jekyll, Albatross (actually it is called Pelican I think 😄) and the plethora of static site generators, all add significant overhead to the process of simplifying content creation in this format. In comparison to Ghost that is. So the question remains, how can one simplify distill the process down to the lowest common requirement? But hang on, what are those requirements?
1) Rich but simple Authoring environment.
2) No costs.
3) Low effort (or at least low effort post setup).
4) Blazing fast response times.
5) Secure by default. (security always comes last ya'll)
It appears, I wasn't the ground breaking, innovative, thought leader (LinkedIn BS bingo anyone?) after all.
A number of repos on Github and one Australian dude attempt to provide this functionality. some more successfully than others. But you see, that little rascal point #3 raises it ugly head, because most of the research I did led me to a veritable rabbithole of dependencies and prerequistes.
Until I chanced upon Sasha Kotlyar's ecto1. It is an elegant and stable alternative solution to the question, "How best to generate a static version of a website based on Ghost?". Sasha (why not just say Aleksandr? A name with a powerful history.. anyways back to the point...) uses environment variables to gather the source and target parameters, once. After that, it is one command whenever you choose to generate your static version. Having done that, use a combination of Github and Github pages or like me Github and Cloudflare Pages to serve your site for free and fast!
1) ✅
2) ✅
3) ✅
4) ✅
5) ✅ (ssl, redirects, ddos protection, certificates, all courtesy Cloudflare)
Now how do you like them apples! That is assuming you got past the laughing fit.