[evilduck]

You technically can compile ASP pages on the fly in production but it's bad practice, just like making changes directly to production is bad practice. The whole blog post is pretty much a great write up of how not to manage a website.

[ericd]

He was talking about small sites, in which case a deploy script, etc. is probably more trouble than it's worth.

[ericd]

Was I incorrect that he was talking about small sites, or do people just believe that every site regardless of size should use a deploy script and the other trappings of large application/high volume production development? Because the latter is silly.

[evilduck]

He was but I don't think that's a valid excuse.

Doing a tested change and then a pushing to production is a 4 command overhead using git as lazily as possible with maybe an additional 5 minutes spent during initial project setup. You're doing the same coding work, you're just helping to ensure it's not going to create any completely useless work spent undoing mistakes. It's an ounce of prevention, pound of cure argument in my mind.

[ericd]

It's really not that clear cut. To do what you propose, you either have to set up an identical staging environment, or you have to set up a local environment that mimics (and stays in sync with!) the production environment. For a tiny site that sees <100 people a day, where the potential damage of a mistake is absurdly low (so what if 5 people see the broken version while you make corrections?) it's not necessarily worth the additional hassle.

This all depends on what kind of site it is, of course, but in the context of what he's saying, it makes sense.