![]() It only does hosting!įirebase functions lets you upload and run code on Google servers without having a dedicated server. You can’t manipulate individual files or have statistics or anything. The dashboard interface is really basic: you can roll back a deployment. Firebase includes a couple of services, I’ll mostly be using hosting and functions.įirebase Hosting lets you upload your static website using a command line program. ![]() If you don’t know what firebase is, check out my article on Firebase. Mainly because our organization already uses Google products, and because I really like the simplicity of firebase compared to the enormous complexity that is Amazon Webservices. In the end I chose to use Google Firebase to host the website. I looked into a couple of static website hosting services like CloudCannon and SiteLeaf which have really cool CMS interfaces as well as a git-backends and added hosting, but they’re quite expensive for a small website. The ‘pipelines’ feature also looked promising to run jekyll for automated deployment. In the end I choose to use Bitbucket because they offer private repositories for free. ![]() It does have the added requirement that you open-source your code. For static websites, Github has great feature that builds and hosts your website on Github servers for free. ![]() It saves you all the trouble of ftp, version management backup etc. Can we do all of that for little or no monthly cost?įor static websites, it really makes sense to use git.In the old site, this link is automatically made by an hourly php cron job. I have weekly blog items that link to weekly youtube videos and podcast audio.How do I make it easy to run a local development * instance of the website?.How do I make it easy to make a quick change to the website?.How do I generate the site from the content?.I made a list of all challenges that i would have to solve in order to do that: Then I thought: let’s go all the way and convert this thing to a jekyll website. I actually got that done in about 1 saturday. I decided to take 1 week to try and rebuild the entire site in flat html. The only thing missing is a wysiwyg editor, but who needs that anyway right? The site i am talking about is mostly text, images and links, and those few dynamic features can be easily solved using either a SaaS webservice or some cloud-based service like amazon lambda. Content management? Git seems perfect for that. The idea of going back to basics and reducing a website to a bunch of files again sounded really good: security, caching, configuration, hosting everything becomes a lot simpler. I had been following developments in static websites for a while, especially jekyll. Even if that meant that it had to be updated by programmers. I figured the time had come to try and make the site better maintainable. Maybe websites are better maintained by technical people. This gives us all kinds of styling and performance problems. ![]() Also, our site-maintainers often copy-paste text from Microsoft Word into Wordpress, and upload pictures of multiple megabytes. For instance, adding new features still takes a lot of time (mostly searching through 100s of css classes). The site has been running for a few years without any major problems, but still I have a few annoyances. Spaghetti: great on a plate, not so much in your code. We got it working, but it cost us a lot of time. Some parts were rebuilt, but most of the time we adapted existing code. We stuck with it, spend months wrestling with the code to make the website do what we want it to do. When I opened the theme in my code editor, I stared at a programmers worst nightmare: a full plate of spaghetti code. We bought a theme that looked nice and started customizing it. We thought we’d save ourselves some time by taking the beaten path: Wordpress with a purchased theme. We wanted to make sure non-technical people would be able to do most of the editing of the website, so a CMS was a must-have. But I still don’t see a lot of documentation of people moving the most popular usage of the internet to the cloud: Websites.Ī couple of years ago I started building a website with a small team in our spare time. As long as I’ve read articles on medium, a lot of stories have been about ‘the cloud’. ![]()
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