Comment by 1dom
5 days ago
How did you get to that position? Did you have to create the server side components to solve the SSG comments problem...?
5 days ago
How did you get to that position? Did you have to create the server side components to solve the SSG comments problem...?
I have always had a comments section on my website since its early days. Originally, my website was written as a set of PHP pages. Back then, I had a PHP page that served as the comment form. So later when I switched to Common Lisp, I rewrote the comment form in it.
It's a single, self-contained server side program that fits in a single file [1]. It runs as a service [2] on the web server [2], serves the comment and subscriber forms, accepts the form submissions and writes them to text files on the web server.
[1] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/form.lisp
[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/etc/form.servi...
[3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/etc/nginx/http...
Nice! So you weren't forced to rewrite a comments solution when you shifted to an SSG, you just coincidentally had to do them at the same time?
It looks like you did exactly what Jeff did: got fed up with big excessive server sides and went the opposite way and deployed and wrote your own minimal server side solutions instead.
There's nothing wrong with that, but what problem were you solving with the SSG part of that solution? Why would you choose to pregenerate a bunch of stuff which might never get used any time anyone comments or updates your website, when you have the compute and processes to generate HTML from markdown and comments on demand?
The common sales points for SSGs are often:
- SSGs are easier (doesn't apply to you because you had to rewrite all your comment stuff anyway)
- cheaper (doesn't apply to you since you're already running a server for comments, and markdown SSR on top would be minimal)
- fewer dependencies (doesn't apply to you, the SSG you use is an added dependency to your existing server)
This largely applies to Jeff's site too.
Don't get me wrong, from a curious nerd perspective, SSGs presented the fun challenge of trying to make them interactive. But now, in 2026, they seem architecturally inappropriate for all but the most static of leaflet sites.
> [...] what problem were you solving with the SSG part of that solution? Why would you choose to pregenerate a bunch of stuff which might never get used any time anyone comments or updates your website, when you have the compute and processes to generate HTML from markdown and comments on demand?
I was not trying to solve a specific problem. This is a hobby project and my choices were driven mostly by personal preference and my sense of aesthetics.
Moving to a fully static website made the stack simpler and more enjoyable to work with. I did not like having to run a local web server just to preview posts. Recomputing identical HTML on every request also felt wasteful (no matter how trivially) when the output never changes between requests. Some people solve this with caching but I prefer fewer moving parts, not more. This is a hobby project, after all.
There were some practical benefits too. In some tests I ran on a cheap Linode VM back in 2010, a dynamic PHP website could serve about 4000 requests per second before clients began to experience delays, while Nginx serving static files handled roughly 12000 requests per second. That difference is irrelevant day to day, but it matters during DDoS attacks, which I have experienced a few times. Static files let me set higher rate limits than I could if HTML were computed on demand. Caching could mitigate this too, but again, that adds more moving parts. Since Nginx performs extremely well with static files, I have been able to avoid caching altogether.
An added bonus is portability. The entire site can be browsed locally without a server. In fact, I use relative internal links in all my HTML (e.g., '../../foo/bar.html' instead of '/foo/bar.html') so I can browse the whole site directly from the local filesystem, from any directory, without spinning up a web server. Because everything is static, the site can also be mirrored trivially to hosts that do not support server-side programming, such as https://susam.github.io/ and https://susam.codeberg.page/, in addition to https://susam.net/. I could have achieved this by crawling a dynamic site and snapshotting it, which would also be a perfectly acceptable solution. Static site generation is simply another acceptable solution; one that I enjoy working with.
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