New year, new site

Why a static site generator for the future

Yeah, it's 2015! And... oooohhhh it's the first post!

The technology status is like sort of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

"What's bower?" "A package manager, install it with npm." "What's npm?" "A package manager, you can install it with brew" "What's brew?" …

— Stefan Baumgartner (@ddprrt) November 5, 2014

Maybe I'm crazy and I like this Gibson/Adams dystopian mashup. It's a challenge for the sharpest mind.

However web-standard-based tools for web developers will be "the best tools for the job". I hope. And I bet.

The web clients hardware/software specs spectrum is almost infinite: from 10 Gb/s fiber and 4K multi-monitors on a very wide table to the cheapest chinese/indian "smartphones" in a remote subequatorial location with horrible 3G connections.

The third world internet access will be the revolution of the near future.

The risks

In 2015 we will see catastrophic DDoS: hacking routers and find passwords is and will be cheap as consumer broadband in the first world.

Unmanaged servers for 10$/month with 1Gb connection or unsecure home routers (or Windows PC :P) can KO your site hosted on a well managed shared server because 1 GB/s of high quality bandwith and the professional routers in a datacenter costs thousands of dollars.

Also the good traffic can destroy and there is nothing that you can, or want, do to prevent your success (!).

Mitigation of the risk

Yeah, optimize everything everywhere always.

Client side

Always automation (optimization of the process) and: concatenate, minimize, gzip compression, caching... optimizing content efficiency.

Server side

LAMP (or RoR or .Net or... the thing that you use ) is everywhere and is cool, but sometimes is misused.
SSI existed before PHP right? For most of the sites the server-side interaction with the user is very minimal and not in almost-real-time.

So, why generate also all the "static" pages on the server and almost in real time?

I know: laziness and ignorance.

Also scale up the traffic on a static site is very very simple. Trust me or read how.

Next time: How?