[minimaxir]

Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if customizations are necessary.

I had self-hosted WordPress on Dreamhost until I got kicked off due to a viral post and my site deleted. Recovering my posts and learning how to use Jekyll/GitHub Pages in less than 24 hours was fun.

[sleepyhead]

"Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if customizations are necessary."

Could be. Content and templates could be hosted on S3. Unfortunately I haven't found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet. I use Jekyll myself and as a developer that's great, not something I would recommend to normal users though. Which is a shame because most users (or small businesses) don't really have such complex requirements. Most don't really need their site to be dynamic, and what requires some server functionality can be solved with an external service (save data, send email etc).

[asteadman]

I like the idea of Jekyll, but I don't like Jekyll itself (I'm pretty sure I have a severe allergic reaction to Ruby).

Something I have yet to see but that I think would be perfect would be a client-side single-page-app that served as a s3-backed static site generator.

Navigate to MyStaticWebsiteGenerator.io (or download it, or self-host it, or clone the repo, it's a simple js-based SPA preferably packaged as a stand-alone ".html" file). AWS credentials (IAM of course) are either stored encrypted in LocalStorage (or Websql or indexeddb or who knows what we are supposed to be using) or queried on demand. It would interact with s3 directly (there is a browser based js api for aws) to manage and modify files directly (multi-user contention and eventual consistency be damned - for small sites it's simply not an issue), and when appropriate, generate/regenerate the static files. Because everything is done client side, the webserver itself never sees or cares about your aws credentials.

Clearly, being a "static site generator", only the admin interface would be JS based, the user-facing generated content would be static. [For some reason every post i've seen doing something remotely similar wants their mostly static content to be rendered at runtime in their js app???]

With prosemirror under active development you should soon be able to have a simple js based WYSIWYG rich text editor that generates nice clean Markdown to feed into your template of choice (à la Jekyll). Your end-users don't need to know markdown or care, they just get a fairly basic rich text editor. Give them a simple interface for defining a website's structure and bob's your uncle.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who thinks this way.

[0xCMP]

Would be interesting if the admin supported S3 or Dropbox as the sources and then generated the site to be at S3.

[tedkimble]

I recently launched Static Website Manager (https://www.staticwebsitemanager.com) which aims bring static sites to a non-technical market. Would love to chat more if you have questions.

[asteadman]

Looks cool, but at first glance (screenshots) it appears to lean heavily on a "git"-like model with branching and merging and rebasing. These are not concepts that I would expect a so-called "non-technical" market to understand or embrace. Something much simpler may be required for such people.

[awad]

I love it! Reminds me of the work we did with Statamic (http://blog.pixlee.com/how-we-allow-anyone-to-make-and-publi...)

[sleepyhead]

Looks pretty cool. Normally I would want something I could self host on Heroku but this looks like something I could consider recommending to clients who wants a simple CMS.

[zimpenfish]

> Unfortunately I haven't found a good admin GUI for a static site generator yet.

Me either but I'm considering using Ghost (which does have a nice frontend) and liberating the content from the SQLite database into static files for generation and serving.

[PuffinBlue]

They deleted your site??? That's pretty extraordinary. Don't they normally just suspend the account, put up a static page indicating so and then ask you to pay some more?

[minimaxir]

What happened was that they forcibly migrated my Wordpress from shared hosting to a VPS to accept the traffic...but they didn't migrate the MySQL database. And the console showed it had a size of 0KB.

A few emails were sent out that day.

[PuffinBlue]

Geez, that sounds like a complete PITA. At least you'll now have a nice version controlled setup, small mercy.

[robertnealan]

This. Current static site generators aren't good for non-engineers, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't need to be the case. Every instance I've seen requires some sort of technical know-how, or integration with Dropbox/Drive/etc (which many non-technical/older people won't necessarily be familiar with).

Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imaging an app where I can buy a domain/hosting, give it my user creds if needed, and it automatically sets everything up for me in a clean interface without needing to know anything about servers/DNS/etc.

[narrowrail]

I think one could use Github's electron (on which Atom is based) and one of the open source WYSIWYGs (possibly tweaked) to get the standalone app you seem to be indicating. Taking one of the slimmer SSGs and packaging it alongside still may result in quite a large binary (not sure).

As for hosting, Amazon's s3 seems the most appropriate. While you could automate domain registration and DNS records, I'm not sure how.

This seems like it could be an interesting project.

[carussell]

I think that's the gestalt of Live Writer, which has been recently open sourced, but it's still Windows-only, so I can't say for sure because I've never personally tried it.