r/statichosting

Preface: I just want to exclaim how excited about my switch to static hosting to people who will understand and appreciate what I did

I collect punk rock and indie rock autographs. That's become my thing the last few years.

I was hosting a show and tell site using Wordpress. A tangle of plug-ins, Advanced Custom Fields, child themes and innumerable styles in the stylesheets.

It kind of functioned, but it was a headache. Even entering data was a pain because the custom fields didn't flow nicely in the UI.

I also had a convoluted method of deploying my site, exporting db, rsyncing to server, then running a second script on the server that used renamed the site to the public version and a few other deploy time database changes. I felt good doing it this way in case my site got hacked by some vulnerability in Wordpress or a plug-in

It worked but I wasn't happy or proud.

Well, no longer.

After browsing this subreddit for ages I've done it AND I've gone overkill.

I build a python app backed by a SQL database. I launch the app locally - it has a rudimentary UI, but it works and I can refine it), enter in a new record or a new artist, copy in new images for the band, the artist, the album, etc.

Then I click Build and a brand new set of HTML files are generated.

Then I click Publish (dry run) to check its all working.

Then I click Publish and that rsyncs it to the server (which is behind cloudflare)

I can serve it locally to make sure all the links are working

In short it's a desktop app to organize my collection that also publishes to the web.

https://preview.redd.it/3l0709ebz8bh1.png?width=2492&format=png&auto=webp&s=c41aab45c860948834b858b754f4b7a79fe1b344

Now that it's static, I'm good against miscreants. I laugh about requests get and post requests to non-existent urls. Sorry guys, there's no .env file, there's no xmlrpc or anything else. :)

And, with a simpler page structure, simpler CSS, it became a lot easier to achieve the "museum" look and feel that I had been striving for unsuccessfully.

I wanted to thank the sub for enlightening me.

And, if the music genres suit you, take a look.

https://lucascollection.com

Hey all! After bouncing between a bunch of projects and thinking about taking on bigger work, I think I'm going back to doing what I was doing a few months ago: building static sites privately and just focusing on getting better.

Honestly, I'm kind of excited about it!!! There's something nice about being able to experiment without worrying about deadlines, client expectations, or whether a particular decision is the "right" one. I can just pick something interesting, build it, break it, rebuild it, and see what happens.

The only problem is that I'm not entirely sure what I should be learning next.

I've spent a lot of time recently on hosting, deployments, and general static site workflows, but I feel like there are probably gaps I don't even know I have yet.

If you were in my position and had a few months to just build things and improve, what would you focus on? Frontend design? Accessibility? Information architecture? Search? Performance? Something else entirely? Would love to hear what skills ended up making the biggest difference in the quality of the sites you build!