Phil Hawksworth – Static Sites Go All Hollywood #fronteers15

Simplicity is not dumbing down.
There is room for creativity even in relatively simple things.
Let’s focus on what matters.
Helps to provide the right optimizations for users.
Benefits about static sites
- cheaper, simpler hosting
- fewer points of failure
- fewer vulnerabilities
- easier compliance
- greater portability
- sandboxed environments
- attrition avoidance
Credibility of static sites
- Just for simple things? That’s not the case
- Campaign for Obama – $250 million dollars donated
  - Static sites perfect for large audiences
  - baked with jekyll
  - large audience
  - rapid iterations
  - hosted statically
- Google project
  - Content on Github
  - baked with jekyll
  - served staticly by google
  - Reduced risk
- Google year in search
  - Annual retrospective
  - large audience
  - infrequently updated
  - long life
  - 40 stories, 52 languages
  - 2.6B social impressions
  - content abstracted
  - baked with “goro”
  - served staticly by google
- Static sites are already mainstream
- Enablers:
  - Front end tooling is a key part
  - Generators and templating -> staticsitegenerators.net
  - Style guides as a side effect… as an artifact… as a process
    - Styleguide driven development
    - How to have a style gide as a secondary output for your site
    - Modules + Templates + Content built site through generator
    - Style guide also built there
    - Unless a style guide is part of your built, it is just more documentation to maintain
  - Automation
    - Gulp grunt, brunch, belch, burp, cough, sneeze ;-)
    - deploy faster, safer
    - update faster
    - feels dynamic
    - surge is good tool to do this deploy
- We need a developer mindset and people want to manage content themselves.
  - traditional web development is very complex with dev, staging and live stages
  - also server side logic
- Static sites are simpler
  - Dev environment: Site generator & build tool -> Production -> User
  - Content as a service that cares about the admin interface.
  - Additionally you could use deployment as a service
  - Is that simplifying?!
    - It’s about shifting/outsourcing complexity. Distance between user and complecity.
    - Source content at build time, not execution time
  - Jekyll data
  - contentful is Content Management as a Service
    - Hosted CMS interface
    - Exposes content via an api
    - Supports translations
    - user roles & management
    - Environments & versions
    - Decouples content administration from the production invironment
    - integrates into jekyll: jekyll-contentfull
  - roots.cx
  - netlify for deployment
    - commit hooks
    - command line interface
    - portable configruration, can be in a config file in the repo
    - notification
    - control of headers
    - basic auth
  - A lot of control
- Limitations:
  - personalization
  - very very large sites
  - user generated content
- Need to find the best fit for the project
- It depends
- http://bit.ly/ssg-hollywood