About this site

calendar Jun 3, 2022 · 3 min read · ssg blog  ·
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I wanted to write a few lines about the reasons which led me to open this site. I decided to start this blog mainly for two reasons:

  • The first one is to have a place to annotate thing I learn in my daily life and in my daily job to retrieve them when I need.
  • The second one is practicing with Static Site Generators (SSG) and markdown to improve quality of my tech documentation.

Years ago I had another blog "M4dGh1gn0's Whispers", it was written in PHP and it was deployed in a LAMP environment. It was a custom CRM written by me, based on another project I had at the time OperaZone.it.

OperaZone was a community for the Italian Opera users with a support forum, based on phpBB

All the content of "M4dGh1gn0's Whispers" has been lost due to the fact that I forgot to pay for the hosting 😚

This gave me an idea to find something which is not subject to a complex environment which includes web servers, databases etc.

Looking around I found these SSGs engines which allows to create a static website from markdown documents.

The concept is simple, you write your content in markdown and than the SSG engine generates static HTML pages of the content accordingly to a theme you choose for your website.

In this way you don't need to keep copies of your code, your pages and your databases and you can stay focused on the content.

The result is that you have to care about your content only, and you can re-generate the entire website whenever you want in a few seconds. The resulting website is very fast and responsive and you don't need a web server to publish it.

Today there are a lot of good alternatives to a web server to publish static content on the web such as AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage and for a fraction of the price of a standard hosting solution which requires at least a web server (Windows o GNU/Linux) and a database service.

I have chosen to deploy it in AWS S3, the pricing for this service is very convenient.

In front of AWS S3 I configured a Cloudflare CDN to cache the content and have some statistics about the website. Cloudflare has a free plan so you don't have to pay anything for their basic service.

Everything seems to be good:

  • Low price
  • Low complexity
  • More secure
  • Easier to be maintained

As for every thing there a pro and cons and cons here is that is more complex to have features like:

  • Search capabilities in your website
  • Support comments for your posts

If these features are mandatory for you, you have to choose carefully before proceeding for this kind of solution.

Search capabilities can be introduced even if you don't have a database via third-party solutions

About comments it is possible to relies on third-party services like Disqus, but it is a payed service.

Anyway, there are some alternatives to Disqus you can use to support comments in your site: