Comment by 1dom
5 days ago
Yes, SSG pipeline + 1 or 2 small self-hosted OSS tools is way simpler than Drupal.
But all you've done in bought on all the pain and compromise of having to think from an SSG perspective, and that created problems which you've already identified you'll figure out in future
I'm suggesting 2 or 3 small self-hosted OSS tools, where one is a small hand crafted server that basically takes a markdown file, renders it, and serves it as plain HTML with a header/footer.
This is more homogenous, fewer unique parts/processes, and doesn't have the constraint of dealing with an SSG.
I remember my own personal pain from 2010 - 2016ish of managing Drupal and Joomla. I did exactly the same as you in 2016 and went all in on SSGs and in 2024, I realised all of the above. I feel like I wasted years of potential development time reinventing basic personal website features to try and work with an SSG and you literally have a ticket to do just that: https://github.com/geerlingguy/jeffgeerling-com/issues/167. 1 of your 3 solutions involves letting someone else host your comments:(
A custom framework/server is the end destination for all nerdy personal websites - I can't wait to see what you make when you realise this:)
edit/p.s. I love you and all your work. Sorry for sounding disagreeable, I'm excited to see what you learn from you SSG journey, I hope you prove me wrong!
Definitely not disagreeable, more just "there are two right answers" ;)
For me, an unstated reason for SSG is being able to scale to millions of requests per hour without scaling up my server to match.
Serving static HTML is insanely easy, even on a cheap $5-10/month VPS. Serving anything dynamic at all is an order of magnitude harder.
Though... I've been using Cloudflare since 2022, after I started getting regular targeted DDoSes (was fun initially, seeing someone target different parts of Drupal, until I just locked down everything except for the final comment pages). The site will randomly get 1-2 million requests in a few minutes, and now Cloudflare eats those quickly, instead of my VPS getting locked up.
Ideally, I'll be able to host without Cloudflare in front at some point, but every month, because of one or two attacks, the site's using 25-35 TB of bandwidth (at least according to CF).
Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. If anyone's wrong here, I'd much rather it was me, if not just because that would mean we've not wasted millions of hours as a society chasing the SSG dragon! :')
I totally see where you're coming from, but you just said it yourself, SSGs don't actually solve any problems for you right now that cloudflare doesn't. A site of Jeffgeerling.com scale is the archetypal scale site that _should_ benefit from SSGs, but Cloudflare is the easier, and arguably better, solution to the traffic/bot/scale problem.
If the problem you hit with Drupal is that it was more and less than you needed and became a headache to maintain, you will hit the same problem with Hugo eventually.
The solution to that problem is to just write your own server side that does what you need. It's so much more fun and rewarding, and I'm confident if you did it, the output would be better. With modern servers and server side technologies, you would most likely not have a problem running your minimal MD->html server on your current VPS behind Cloudflare.
Worst case scenario is you spend your time dealing with problems or misunderstandings with your own code, at least that'll be a refreshing change to dealing with problem or misunderstandings in Drupal's or Hugo's code or decisions.
There's a time and a place for SSGs, and geerlingengineering is the perfect use case, because it has no real interactivity. But - again, please take this from a place of candour than intended offence - from a user perspective, in the process of migrating Jeffgeerling.com to hugo, comments and search have been broken. Your migration to Hugo has just begun, you did the easy hugo part and created a post suggesting it was done. But the extra phases and tickets for comments and search suggest there's no obvious and easy answer on how to finish migrating interactive bits to an SSG.
Custom server side software is a complete solution, SSGs restrict what your complete solution can be without being one themselves. Nobody really seems to mention this until they move away from SSGs.
(Sorry for the bluntness again! Thanks again for your content, I stumble across your stuff all the time. I migrated my dad from a Windows XP machine to a Pi, and your resources are particularly useful and accessible for both of us!)
"you just said it yourself, SSGs don't actually solve any problems for you right now that cloudflare doesn't"
"Why go to all the burden of serving a few k of static html directly when you could just require a globe-spanning mega cdn?"
1 reply →