Tags: jamstack

The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

It me:

Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

This rings sadly true to me:

Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.

Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:

Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? | Transitional Apps with Rich Harris, NYTimes - YouTube

This is a terrific and nuanced talk that packs a lot into less than twenty minutes.

I heartily concur with Rich’s assessment that most websites aren’t apps or documents but something in between. It’s a continuum. And I really like Rich’s proposed approach: transitional web apps.

(The secret sauce in transitional web apps is progressive enhancement.)

Uniting the team with Jamstack | Trys Mudford

This is a superb twenty minute presentation by Trys! It’s got everything: a great narrative, technical know-how, and a slick presentation style.

Conference organisers: you should get Trys to speak at your event!

Making the Clearleft podcast is a lot of fun. Making the website for the Clearleft podcast was also fun.

Design wise, it’s a riff on the main Clearleft site in terms of typography and general layout. On the development side, it was an opportunity to try out an exciting tech stack. The workflow goes something like this:

• Open a text editor and type out HTML and CSS.

Comparing this to other workflows I’ve used in the past, this is definitely the most productive way of working. Some stats:

• Time spent setting up build tools: 00:00
• Time spent wrangling the pipeline to do exactly what you want: 00:00
• Time spent trying to get the damn build tools to work again when you return to the project after leaving it alone for more than a few months: 00:00:00

I have some files. Some images, three font files, a few pages of HTML, one RSS feed, one style sheet, and one minimal service worker script. I don’t need a web server to do anything more than serve up those files. No need for any dynamic server-side processing.

I guess this is JAMstack. Though, given that the J stands for JavaScript, the A stands for APIs, and I’m not using either, technically it’s Mstack.

Netlify suits my hosting needs nicely. It also provides the added benefit that, should I need to update my CSS, I don’t need to add a query string or anything to the link elements in the HTML that point to the style sheet: Netlify does cache invalidation for you!

The mp3 files of the actual podcast episodes are stored on S3. I link to those mp3 files from enclosure elements in the RSS feed, which is what makes it a podcast. I also point to the mp3 files from audio elements on the individual episode pages—just above the transcript of each episode. Here’s the page for the most recent episode.

I also want people to be able to download the mp3 file directly if they want (or if they want to huffduff an episode). So I provide a link to the mp3 file with a good ol’-fashioned a element with an href attribute.

I throw in one more attribute on that link. The download attribute tells the browser that the URL in the href attribute should be downloaded instead of visited. If you give a value for the download attribute, it will over-ride the file name:

<a href="/files/ugly-file-name.xyz" download="nice-file-name.xyz">download</a>

Or you can use it as a Boolean attribute without any value if you’re happy with the file name:

<a href="/files/nice-file-name.xyz" download>download</a>

There’s one catch though. The download attribute only works for files on the same origin. That’s an issue for me. My site is podcast.clearleft.com but my audio files are hosted on clearleft-audio.s3.amazonaws.com—the download attribute will be ignored and the mp3 files will play in the browser instead of downloading.

Trys pointed me to the solution. It turns out that Netlify can do some server-side processing. It can do redirects.

I added a file called _redirects to the root of my project. It contains one line:

/download/*  https://clearleft-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast/:splat  200

That says that any URLs beginning with /download/ should redirect to clearleft-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/podcast/. Everything after the closing slash is captured with that wild card asterisk. That’s then passed along to the redirect URL as :splat. That’s a new one on me. I hadn’t come across that terminology, but as someone who can never remember the syntax of regular expressions, it works for me.

Oh, and the 200at the end is the status code: okay.

Now I can use this /download/ path in my link:

<a href="/download/season01episode06.mp3" download>Download mp3</a>

Because this URL on the same origin, the download attribute works just fine.

SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford

Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).

I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.

I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.

Basil: Secret Santa as a Service | Trys Mudford

Trys writes up the process—and the tech (JAM)stack—he used to build basil.christmas.

Own Your Content on Social Media Using the IndieWeb—zachleat.com

A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.

Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.

Ooops, I guess we’re full-stack developers now.

Chris broke both his arms just to avoid speaking at the JAMstack conference in London. Seems a bit extreme to me.

Anyway, to make up for not being there, he made a website of his talk. It’s good stuff, tackling the split.

It’s cool to see the tech around our job evolve to the point that we can reach our arms around the whole thing. It’s worthy of some concern when we feel like complication of web technology feels like it’s raising the barrier to entry

JAMstack? More like SHAMstack. | CSS-Tricks

Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.

I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:

MAJstack!

This is my maj.

Medium | Stackbit

This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.

You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.

StaticGen | Top Open Source Static Site Generators

There are a lot of static site generators out there!